I´m working currently on a project at my university. Maybe are some of you are interested into the same topic and wanna help me to get some new ideas
I´m trying to increase the player experience within an interactive environment. For that I wanna integrate some special output devices like fans, smell, a vibrating chair or a low frequency bass to that environment with an Arduino Board and the Uniduino Plugin. Maybe we´re going to use Oculus Rift later too. The focus of that project are the output devices. My ideas so far are about two Scenes:
VMotor from the Asset Store (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/12121)
I thought it´s great to feel the wind depending to the Speed you drive. Also it would be conceivable that I can integrate the vibrating Chair for the real bike feeling and smell of grass if you drive off the speedway.
Little Modified Tuscany Demo from Oculus (https://share.oculusvr.com/app/oculus-tuscany-demo)
Because its a very atmospheric scene I think. So I thought it would be cool the feel the sea breeze and smell the flowers and maybe other things within the building. But thats just too little and I need some more things
My question to you people is now, if you got some more useful ideas to integrate some of the displays types above (or other kind of displays) into a virtual environment? Maybe you also know some other scenes (bootcamp for example) which are preferably for free which I can use for other ideas? I´m not able to develop everything from scratch because I just have limited to realize these things.
I need your help!!! Thank you so much in advance!!!
I just bought an arduino kit to use with the oculus rift, and uniduino. Sadly I haven’t had time to even open it yet.
Definitely using accelerometer or character rotation as input to control fans to blow harder in the direction you’re facing while playing a flying game or racing game would be great.
Getting 2 linear actuators to move based on roll/pitch would be awesome for creating a gaming chair that tilts left/right and forward/back based on gameplay. Im planning to make a small scale version this summer and if it works get larger parts.
A space heater could simulate hot air like from flames/explosions.
I think the fan ideas would be easiest to implement, you could probably hack up the uniduino lighting example to control fans instead.
I’d probably see what you’re able to make with the arduino and create the game around that.
Not what you are doing but I am working on an air drum kit where you lay out the drumkit in Unity and use Arduino with sensors to track drumsticks to play the air drums in the space around you with. The toughest part is getting the actual 3D position in space but using a combo of infrared LED’s being visually tracked by cams and accelerometers on both ends of the drumsticks gets me in the ballpark. Arduino rocks. I can now understand and program embedded systems.
Thank you for your first feedback
I already integrated a small pc fan with arduino. But wanna use more and bigger ones soon. You’re right, it was pretty easy to implement
A heating element would be a nice thing I guess! I will maybe try that if I spot how to build the arduino circuit
I´m wondering, you guys have no more ideas which physical feedback would be nice to experience in a game?
according to the uniduino clip (http://youtu.be/EdSnjB-GIGg) lights would be easy to set up but on the other hand useless if you want to use the oculus rift later
Randy, your Projects sounds pretty cool too! But your project is more about the input, mine about the output.
Still hope to get some more feedback!!!
thank you!
You have to have input to get output. Having two sticks in the hands that you can track pitch, yaw and roll, acceleration and compass direction as well as relationship between the two positions and angles opens up alot of output control possibilities. For instance with the Arduino and a DMX controller I could conceivably control an entire set of stage lighting to fire various colors on and off based on any of the parameters. I could control any number of MIDI based modules to produce any sound or effects wash I deem to hook to any particular vector, acceleration or stop motion. I could use the horizontal and vertical axis motion and acceleration to control any game character or vehicle or environment in any game. I could steer a virtual automobile by using the sticks in a steering wheel fashion and control the speed via their pitch. With the OR I could set up a full hemisphere of 127 drums or striking surfaces or objects like skull drums and bones xylophones. A stop and reverse at a particular point in space produces a hit and a stop and pull swipe triggers a roll. Couple it to a servomotor/actuator driven stool for physical feedback. Play drums at 3am in your apartment without the cops coming because your neighbors are pissed. Here is a great link with a ton of Arduino based projects. This may be of some assistance in rapid prototyping for your project.
You’re doing an arduino controlled scent dispenser paired with an oculus rift?
That’s an interesting idea; smell is one of the more underrated senses in that we don’t think about it much, but it’s also the most memorable sense and it’s the one that most directly illicits emotional responses.
You should checkout the flight sims people make using windscreen wiper motors, they must be cheap and seemingly powerful(TBH I’m a bit skeptical as to how strong they would be).
I like the idea of connecting the Arduino up but IMO the Arduino is just annoying the way its on the big board, I prefer the Picaxe or AVR chips as they are just single chips, and they are much cheaper(A few dollars for a Picaxe or even cheaper for AVR chips) the only issue is that Picaxe doesn’t support USB and AVR’s ether only support USB via a software implementation or they are some new ones that no one uses(AFAIK the popular ones to use are ATTINY 25, 45 and 85) you can connect to Picaxes easily through serial communication though and its pretty simple to set that up in Unity. I had a wireless serial module hooked up to a Picaxe and Unity that controlled a little remote controlled buggy. It was super cool.
I’d like to get into programming some AVR chips more but I got a flashing light up and running and it took lots of scary looking code (Why cant it just be like “ledOn = !ledOn” ?) anyway I hope to get back into it.
Exactly! Thats why we build our own small olfactory display we will use with different aromatic oils to simulate the smell. Smell is a quite important sense, especially because of the emotional factors (as you said it already). but as you may expect, the situations you can useful integrate smell into an interactive environment are pretty rare…My ideas so far are all pretty simple: Grass, flowers, food, maybe also smelling fire or the sea breeze…that´s why I ask you guys if you got some further ideas for me
