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Google cardboard (or flatpack VR, or the maketrix…i'll stop now)

Ever since I watched “Tron” and  “The lawnmower man” in the early 90’s I’ve wanted to have virtual reality at home, not the migraine inducing virtual boy, nor the over hyped fail of 3d TV. No, I wanted actual 3d virtual worlds to explore.

Well that dream is nearly here, in the next 12 months we should be able to get our hands on Sony’s project Morpheus, face books oculus rift and a whole new world of other headsets and visors that promise to give us access to our own personal holodeck experiences.

But for now we have to wait- unless you spend big bucks on a developer kit.

Or so I thought. It turns out that all you need is a smart phone, cardboard box, some glue and a pair of lenes from eBay, you can build your own fully functional VR headset!

Having found this out i went straight to google’s google cardboard website and downloaded and printed the pdf.

While i waited for the lenes I ordered from eBay to arrive i got a head start by building the headset itself. I assembled all the tools needed to make this bit of high tech meets low tech kit.

I started by cutting out the template and gluing it to a flattened cardboard box, this took allot longer than i planned,  the tabs and hole were fiddly and I nearly sliced off my fingers on several occasions.

After an hour waiting for the glue to set and a further hour swearing at the god of cardboard for letting such a complex and exasperating card folding monstrosity to come into existence, I finally had my full cut out and ready template, now I just needed to fold it , put tab A into slot B, and slot in my old iPhone 4S and would be away!!

How wrong I was (I’m married so should be used to being wrong by now). Getting the bugger to actually slot into place was a nightmare- the holes don’t line up, the tabs are to small and glue and tape wont keep the thing together!

After a quick game of bloodborne to calm me down (in hind sight not the best game to relax to) I tried again and with a bit of creative adjustment (and more swearing) I finally got the thing to look like the web site pics…sort of.

Now I just have to await the lenses to arrive and I can enter the matrix!! or more likely look like a mental with box stuck to his face- either way I’m happy with the result so far…now where did I leave my light cycle?