For the LEGO World 2012 exhibition in Denmark we (CAVI at Aarhus University) created a small interactive installation using Unity. It’s based on a 55 inch display that uses finger tracking and marker tracking as available inputs. Visitors could interact with an endless stream of LEGO bricks by drawing obstacles, or by placing physical LEGO blocks on the table, which acted as color magnets. The force of the magnets could be adjusted by rotating the magnets. We built optical fibres into the physical bricks so that whatever was shown on the table would also be visualized on top of the bricks. We used this to show the strength of the magnets by pulsating in different frequencies.
The possibilities in the installation are rather limited, and the idea was to just let people play with the installation and create their own small “games”. Some would try to block all the bricks from falling to the bottom. Some would try to capture bricks by pulling them with magnets and then build barricades around them. All kinds of small ideas were tried out by children and adults during the four days it ran, although we didn’t give them any instructions in using the system.
Could you provide some more info? I’m always interested in studying these things, but I’m not sure exactly what you mean. Are you talking about the hardware or the visuals?
The above post is rather dumb, too cheap to use, and too shit to be understandable.
@ Jarnis, I just noticed that you are from CAVI, not just reposting a news release.
Well Done! It’s awesome to see unity being used in such a fashion!
Would you mind telling us more about how you did it e.g. how much did the screen cost, how hard was it to integrate the input system with U3D etc. as well as where YOU think this will go?
Because you haven’t actively looked for it, and/or it’s not marketed at people with no money. Considering each table is about $7k each, it’s like a ring in jewelry store that sits quietly because it has no price tag (hence the proce is very high) so people ignore it.
On all their videos it is a laggy crap thing, no more no less. I though that the Samsung SUR40 is the table then microsoft made the software? if this is true then you cannot buy a microsoft surface as you must preorder it.
@ NPSF3000 and everybody else. The installation is based on a product called MultiTaction from a finnish company called MultiTouch. The screen was given to us specifically for this project, so I don’t really know the price. I can’t find it on their website either: http://multitouch.fi/products/
The screen has an embedded Linus box that runs the tracking software and sends data based on the TUIO protocol. We have a networked machine that runs a piece of custom-built software called an Event Bus. This allows us to get input from all kinds of things (OSC, TUIO, wiimotes, arduinos, web interfaces etc.) and send data out as whatever we want (TUIO again for example but through smoothing filters or whatever we want).
In this rather simple setup I’m able to spawn prefabs based on finger tracking or the ID’s of the markers put on the screen. As long as the tags are on the table, the objects in Unity follows their location and rotation.
These kind of screens are still quite expensive I guess. We’ve also built similar tables using a webcam that films a surface and a projector that projects on the same surface. The main advantage for us was having a screen that has a built-in camera although it’s only 20 cm deep. The tables we build ourselves need to have a surface in a certain distance from the projector.
