Oculus Rift enables you to escape into incredible virtual (or live-action) worlds, but strapping on the goggles is precisely that—an escape. Which is what makes this new open-source project by Diego Araos so crazy: using the goggles' head-motion tracking feature and live video feed, you can actually navigate an AR drone with a tilt of your noggin.


Check out the vid:


All it takes is a slight shift in perspective—looking up, down, or to either side—to make the little guy go flying wherever you want. We've seen Oculus and a hand-operated controller take on actual drones in the great outdoors before, but I haven't seen that function with this level of refinement.

Here's Araos with a bit more about how he did it:

I connected the AR Drone to my laptop using node.js (node-ar-drone to control & node-livestream for video feed). As for the client-side is a HTML5 web-interface that process the video feed using two canvas elements, it also connects to a REST server that reads the information of the head-motion sensors from the Oculus Rift and then computes the joystick, which are sent back to the node.js server and commanded to the drone to control pitch/roll/yaw. TL;DR version I used node.js to connect to the video feed and command the drone. Had to make a special adapter to carry the Oculus Rift around with a battery... now I have a wireless Oculus Rift! :)

He threw the whole thing up on GitHub, too. As more folks get their hands on the tech, I can't even begin to imagine the kind of wild, wild crossovers between VR and real life that will begin to emerge. [YouTube]