Video VR Extension

In the ancient days of Oculus DK1 (Dev Kit 1) there did not exist the plethora of options to watch panoramic video online - much less so in a Virtual Reality headset. This project pioneered this concept early in 2014 - well before Youtube officially rolled out 360 video and WebVR was a thing.

I created a Chrome extension that inserted a canvas into the youtube page and used an old project called vr.js that utilized the now deprecated NPAPI to read the input from the DK1. I then use the video as a texture in a 3D scene I created on the canvas. Watch the demo video I made to see how it worked.

Demo video on Youtube. The video moves around in the video player in response to the movement of the Oculus Rift DK1 I had on my head.

There were some funky projections available like "cylinder" and "cube". At the time I had a capture device (cylindrical mirror) that I could put over the lens of an iPhone to capture panoramic video.

Many of these were uploaded to Youtube for watching with the extension. Watch some of them on youtube.