This Throwback VR Headset Uses Sony Watchman CRTs as Its Displays

Pseudonymous maker "dooglehead" has built a self-confessed "terrible VR headset," which throws back to the earliest attempts at the technology by swapping out the usual high-resolution flat-panel liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) or organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) for cathode-ray tubes (CRTs).

"Modern VR headsets are really good, but they all use LCD and OLED displays," dooglehead explains of the project's inspiration. "I've always found there to be something appealing about playing games on CRTs, and I've been wondering what it would be like to be in a virtual world where everything in my field of view is made up of images drawn on CRTs."

Cathode-ray tubes were, for decades, the dominant form of display for everything from radars and oscilloscopes to computers and TV receivers. They work by holding a glass tube in vacuum and firing a magnetically-steered electron beam at phosphor-coated glass, energizing the phosphor and making it briefly glow — and repeating the process line-by-line 50 times a second to create what looks like a stable image.

They have a number of benefits over modern flat-panel displays in a range of metrics, bar one: weight. They're bulky and heavy, and ill-suited to wearable use. Even the earliest virtual reality headsets tended to opt for basic LCD panels rather than higher-quality CRTs, but that doesn't mean it's not possible to build a VR headset using the tech — as dooglehead has proven.

The headset, currently cased in a temporary cardboard housing to be replaced in the future with a more robust 3D-printed shell, is based on compact 2.7" CRTs developed by Sony for the Watchman family of portable TVs. An FPGA delivers the glue logic required to receive an HDMI signal from a PC and split it into two analog signals, one for each display. Commercial off-the-shelf "lighthouse" trackers serve to monitor the wearer's head position and angle, and everything is powered via USB — with the CRTs measured at around 200mA each.

"It's 544 grams [around 1.2lbs], which is actually not that heavy," dooglehead notes. "I think a lot of other VR headsets are similar to that. It obviously doesn't look great compared to a modern headset, but my expectations were very low — so I was just surprised to see it looked as good as it did."

More details are available in the video embedded above and on dooglehead's YouTube channel — though anyone looking to follow along and build their own should take care, as uncased CRTs expose extremely high voltages and will absolutely ruin your day if you poke the wrong area with a bare finger.