Whilst not strictly a true VR headset, this was my budget solution way back when the Oculus Rift DK1 was released. The Durovis Dive was being developed, but Google’s cardboard wasn’t even heard of, so technically I was the first to build a disposable VR headset [along with hundreds of other tech-nerds!].
Version 6 of my homemade smartphone headset
The aforementioned Dive’s SDK didn’t work live in Unity editor [and at the time I had no knowledge of Xcode], so I found another script online developed for Android and tweaked it to allow my iPhone to stream the image live from my mac, while allowing the phone itself to provide the head-tracking controls via its gyroscope.
This allowed me to play with experiments in Unity as if I were developing for a PC-based HMD such as the Rift [albeit with rather noticeable lag and horrendously large pixels – horray for imagination!].
