Control PC via iPad

Unity Engine
1

Hey guys,

I’m new here so it is time to say “Hi!” I think :slight_smile:
But I don’t just want to talk, I need your help. In the moment I work on my bachelor thesis, I want to build a small multi-device app, it is going to be a product configuration tool.

I will try to explain my plan: You have an iPad in your hand and can choose some properties of your product, e.g. the color of a car. You are able to rotate the product via touchscreen. Via a button you can change the camera and have a look inside the car. You have more than one car you can customise so there are different scenes in the same project. All the interaction happens at the iPad. This part of the application is already working.

My problem: While you are doing the iPad stuff the same picture/animation of the car is supposed to be shown without GUI and maybe with another background on a large display which is connected to a PC or Mac. You can label the iPad in this case as input or remote device I think. Maybe you can call it a mirroring app, too.

I am an absolute newbie in Unity networking stuff, right now I don’t even know what I can Google ask for. Maybe I miss the forest for the trees (it is possible to say that in english?) and it is super easy or there was another guy in this forum who already asked the same question (so I have to say sorry). Can anyone give me a hint where I have to search in the documentary or where I can find a similar thread?

Greetings

2

There’s any number of ways you can approach this. For example, if you used Unet you can have the PC host and the iPad connects to it. You give authority of the car gameobject to the connected iPad user, so that on the iPad you can make changes to the car. After making a change to the car on the iPad you could use messages to the server or commands to update the car displayed on the PC.

On the PC all you’d really need in the scene is the car and a camera focusing on it, while you’d display whatever UI you need to manipulate the car on the iPad. You might want to make it look cool or something and have the camera on the PC rotate around the car while you’re updating it on the iPad.

Check out the various tutorials on Unet for a place to start. Describing the details of everything is far too large of a topic to cover on a web forum.