NerdLens: Mirror your computer with cardboard VR

Summary

Put your computer screen in a headset you already own. A wired, open-source VR desktop experiment for iPhone and Google Cardboard. NerdLens captures your desktop, compresses it into JPEG frames, sends those frames over USB, and renders them on a virtual screen inside a stereoscopic Cardboard view. No expensive headset. No cloud streaming. Just a phone, a cardboard viewer, and an arguably unreasonable amount of curiosity. ImportantNerdLens is an early proof of concept, not a polished consumer app. The current mobile project targets iOS, requires a source build, and is best suited to hacking and experimentation. Stream a selected display or window into VR at a configurable target of 10–60 FPS Keep traffic on a wired USB tunnel through iproxy Show a live preview, connection state, frame count, resolution, and target FPS Move the virtual display closer or farther away without leaving the headset Recover from interrupted frame writes with automatic reconnect attempts Keep the iPhone awake during a viewing session flowchart LR A["Desktop or window"] --> B["Svelte capture UI"] B -->|"JPEG frames"| C["Tauri / Rust host"] C -->|"TCP :12345"| D["iproxy USB tunnel"] D --> E["Unity iOS client"] E --> F["Texture on a VR display"] F --> G["Google Cardboard"] B -->|"distance setting"| C Loading The phone runs the TCP server; the desktop host connects to localhost:12345, which iproxy forwards to the attached iPhone. Each message starts with a one-byte type followed by a big-endian payload length and the payload itself. Type Payload Purpose 0 none Keep-alive, reserved by the client 1 JPEG bytes Replace the texture shown in VR 2 UTF-8 JSON Update viewer settings such as display distance macOS and Xcode An iPhone running iOS 13 or newer A Google Cardboard-compatible viewer A USB cable Unity Hub with Unity 6000.1.5f1 and iOS Build Support Bun, Rust, and the Tauri system prerequisites iproxy from libimobiledevice Install iproxy with Homebrew: brew install libimobiledevice Then clone the...