IMO, Unity and Arduino have a lot in common. No 1 similarity is in their popularity. But I wonder, when they comes together, will their relationship generate some sparks or will fall into deaf ears.
I am more than positive that a lot can be done with this two. From Aruduino Controlled hybrid games to Unity AI driven Robots and gadgets. Possibilities are endless and fun.
But one question remains… does this community have geeks with the skillset required to tinker with the Arduino part? I mean to handle breadboards and wires. Or is this a software only community.
Do you have any interest in seeing this happen? If so, please give a heads up and post a line or two on this.
I’ve worked with Arduino and am not sure what/why you would want to combine with Unity. Unity is about graphics, none of which the Arduino could do anything with.
I might use Unity to design some very simple AI, and then rewrite it for the Arduino and whatever sensors I was using. But, there are robotics groups that probably would be more useful to get in touch with.
The couple of projects I did use both was to use the Arduino to get input from a sensor, that is pretty fun. I’ve since used Kinect, Leap and just the webcam since it’s a bit easier to work with.
I plan to use inputs from arduino to control game elements or player. Simple example would be to control a turret in a game through an arduino based physical toy turret.
Thats one way. Another can be output modes where you can drive arduino based system or boards by unity powered behaviors and ai. Simple example would be to implement astar pathfinding in a robot to pathfind in an identical maze.
Usage can get complex. Like the ai can play a board game with you too.
I think you underestimate Arduino. There is currently a push to have Arduino in every school in Australia! It is just Arduino is more of a hobby thing while unity is a professional thing.
There is actually a plugin in the asset store which does some of this.
I have also had some success reading the serial output from the Arduino although I haven’t tried to send serial messages from unity to the board. It could result in some really immersive gaming experiences for one off installations.
Indeed, in many ways, Arduino is the hardware parallel of Unity in terms of democratization. People do crazy awesome things with Arduino, there was tons of awesome applications a the Makers Fair this year.
The most obvious point of linking unity to arduino is you can make custom controllers and other peripherals for unity and your game, that just being a start. Uniduino already exists for ardiuno, i intend to get it, and unity and arduino are a perfect match for software that may not be a game but drive audio and visuals via interaction on anything an arduino can sense (which is just about anything with the right kit)
I dont propose an IO extension like uniduino. Actually I think the kits can heavily use that. What I propose are different projects based on these two. Projects can be utility based or entertainment. I can see unity can bring in a lot of already existing knowledge to operate arduino driven systems or use arduino sensors as input for unity based games.
Most projects will maintain a live link between unity and arduino board.
To use it as a controller you only need one way communication (from controller to the game) and you just use the serial port for this. If you google a bit you will find a few threads on how to read the serial port in unity.
Yes, the simpler kits with one way communication won’t be requiring uniduino as a must. But I think a version using uniduino libraries can co-exist, makes life easier.
Being as we are in the modern world, Unity providing meaningful output to your own display using arduino is possible too, actually you could have it do all sorts of mechanical ‘real’ world things, from a cheesy enthusiast mech-games’ cockpit to controlling other hardware devices. (I might add, name a current gen controller that only has one way communication with the machine using it). Unity needn’t always make games, ive found unity a good tool for visuals in live performances where there are possibly random events, elements driven by sensing factors in the environment via a kinect, for a unity -specifc ‘sense’ and that contribute to behaviour thats ends up part of arduino IO as the arduino takes information from other sources
Quite excited about using Arduino for stuff actually