The VR Pricing Problem
One of the biggest challenges facing every manufacturer of virtual reality accessories is lowering prices. Virtual reality will never be as "massive" as they want if buying a headset costs hundreds of euros without even counting the hardware. Unable to afford an Oculus Rift, three young people and a professor in France designed the Relativ, an open-source virtual reality headset that averages $100 in components.
Rift and Vive Costs vs. DIY
The Oculus Rift costs 449 euros shipped to Spain. The HTC Vive is much higher, reaching 699 euros. Add the general cost of hardware, the complex situation with graphics cards (courtesy of crypto mining), and the low number of titles that supposedly justify paying such a premium, and it becomes very hard to recommend virtual reality as a form of entertainment. The main market players know the parameters are not ideal, and one of the priorities is lowering the price of headsets. However, the best cost-benefit ratio seems to be in DIY, and that's demonstrated by the Relativ project.
The Relativ Team and Components
Maxime Coutté, Jonas Ceccon, Gabriel Combe, and math professor Jerome Dieudonne are the four members of the team that created Relativ, an open-source headset based on Arduino hardware, the WRMHL platforms (high-speed communication between the Unity engine and Arduino), and FastVR (creating VR-compatible games in Unity). The main components are an Arduino Due (or a Chinese clone at a third of the official price), the MPU-6050 module with accelerometer and gyroscope, two 50mm Fresnel lenses (the same ones used in Google Cardboard), and a 5.5-inch 1440p screen, whose price can vary greatly on sites like eBay and Aliexpress.
Printing and Alternatives
After loading all the necessary software into the Arduino, the last step is 3D printing the headset, which has the potential to completely blow the original $100 budget. However, there are alternatives like modifying generic headsets, or why not, adapting the aforementioned Cardboard to receive all the hardware. Even if the final cost ends up at $150 or $200, that's still a fraction of what's charged for a Rift or a Vive, and if you like the idea of optimizing code or improvising, Relativ might be a better option.
