The virtual reality Gun controller

A lot of things have happened since the last update. Being the most important one that I achieve to get a job in the augmented reality industry! This has keep me very busy for the last year, but I have effectively managed to learn a lot in the field and also Android, iOS, Unity3D and many… many more. I love it!

Now that my “learning” curve has eased out I finally got time to carry on in my personal projects / hacks. And this time I promise I will put some proper code and tutorials (by the way I have enabled the comments so feel free to comment code in the older entries).

So this first new entry is related to the fact that I just received an Oculus Rift. This HMD is called to push the VR back in the trenches and I wanted to try it first hand… It promises real-time head tracking and perfect 3D vision of the environment with an epic field-of-view. You can move around the scenarios and after 3 minutes you truly believe you are inside. But head tracking is not everything in Virtual Reality and there is still some edges to cut: one of those is solving the problem of “moving around” with some kind of localization and I will talk about that one at some point; but the interesting one today is interacting with the environment, and when I say interacting I mean shooting at things… time for some Virtual Reality FPS.

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Applications for the AR system

One of the advantages of the AR system developed is the ability to couple the logic of a video game. At the same time I was coding the system, my friend Carlos Torija was designing a video
game, he created the artificial intelligence and logic and then we both added simple graphics with openGL and gave it some AR. In this game you have to evade/attack an evil drone that follows and tries to kill you. The game has been produced to be played in a open space and it has virtual walls! Next step includes map recognition.

I also started another AR game using my system. I planned to release it for bada 2.0 but Samsung keeps delaying it so the game is unfinished. The game is an augmented stunt kite simulator, at the moment it has really simple physics and fixed wind but I plan to add a wind system using weather forecast and advanced physics in order to perform realistic tricks.20120114140835

NintendoDS experiments

I know that Nintendo DS is old hardware now, but back in my time it was awesome! One day I discovered PAlib for NDS and I decided to investigate. I came up with some weird ideas, from a back-scratching game to a portable version of the “Shelters of Catan” board game (now it do exists for NDS but it is not my unfinished-experimental version). I also started to program a time-based multiplayer gymkhana game for various teams so they can play in a specific forest, and the clues had to be solved using the NDS.

These projects taught me how hard is to create a game without a real graphical artist in the team, but I also found that seeing your results in a video-console transmits and amazing feeling.

Note: the scratching game is about…that. With difficulty from stinting to herpes!

The home-made VR system

During my holidays I was growing quite fat due to inactivity and I was spending to much time playing Minecraft. Here at home I have got a dance mat for DDR and those rhythm games but I don’t really like them, so I decided to create something funny, healthy and a bit geek: a home-made virtual reality system!

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The Augmented Agenda

Augmented Reality is probably one of the most eye-catching technologies nowadays. I still remember how I started to dream about it years before it became an emerging technology. Much time later I was able to do a complete dissertation about it (I will talk about this in another section).

My very first try with AR supposed the creation of a weird idea I had long time ago: some day AR and social networks will work completely together and people will be able to see personal information about me just pointing at me with their phones. This terrible future is too close and I decided it was possible to create an App that explains the idea.

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