Wearable Virtual Reality Camera

The purpose of the project was to design and build a wearable virtual reality camera for use as communication tool on social media. The team was a participant in a collaborative project between the Senior Design program and the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program. The Engineering team developed a wearable virtual reality camera to be used for 3-D social media while the Entrepreneurship team planned a path to market. The device, called Vidi VR, fits like eye glasses and contains small cameras above each eye that capture the user’s exact perspective, and a stereo microphone to capture the sounds of the environment. The camera is connected wirelessly to the user’s smartphone and experiences are sent to a virtual reality headset that lets the viewer experience a moment in realistic 3-D as if they were actually there. This patent-pending device will enable the transition from 2-D social media on smartphones to 3-D social media in virtual reality. Anyone with a smartphone can experience virtual reality via a $10 headset that uses their smartphone screen as the display, which lowers the barrier of entry into virtual reality.