Design and Implementation of an Immersive Virtual Reality System based on a Smartphone Platform

With the increasing power of mobile CPUs and GPUs, it is becoming tractable to integrate all the components of an interactive, immersive virtual reality system onto a small mobile device. We present a demonstration of a head-mounted display system integrated onto an iPhone-based platform. In building this demonstration we tackled two main problems. First, how to integrate the user-interface, utilizing the phone itself as an unseen touch interface. Second, how to integrate multiple inertial measuring units to facilitate user interaction. The resulting system indicates the practicality of mobile virtual reality systems based on smartphones.