Tag: input

VR Blink Detection

In December 2015 I was invited to Granada Gaming, a Video-games festival held in my home town, to talk about VR and my interaction experiments. Very exciting times!

I had to give two talks: the first one was oriented to all the professionals (coders, artists, journalists) where I explained some of the decisions I took while creating Apnea (my always in-progress  videogame). The second talk was for a general public and for this one I wanted to talk about something that seems to concern a lot of people: VR limitation and why FPS won’t work very well at the beginning.

I won’t cover the whole talk here as many of the interaction experiments showcased can be found already in the “VR Wireless” post and my github page, but I created something I thing is a cool hack to solve one of the main trends in VR movement: the blink transition.

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Hack ‘n Slash

October 2014 came fast and I was ready for another HackManchester after having a blast the previous year. But this time having to work +60 hours in a week made me take the decision of doing something much simpler so I could get some sleep.

At this point I was starting to experiment with an idea for what later will become Apnea, my first ever commercial/experimental game (still in the making… but more on this on another post). One of the key features of Apnea was the detection of the user steps using the HMD’s accelerometer and another one was the detection of the user breath with the microphone. Soon I realized I had a problem: every time the user walked very strange signals appeared in the breath detector, quite odd! I fixed those problems much later, but by that time I decided what if I make a small interactive game out of this odd behaviour?

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Light Raider

Half a year after HackManchester I decided to give  a go to a Data-Based Hackaton… this time joining a team with friends. The result was the Light Raider, an Android app that encourages running among Mancunians by targeting lamps in the streets. It went really well as we won in “life quality” topic … and I used that money to get me an Oculus Rift SDK 2 (but that is a different story) and we even got showcased by some of the local media.

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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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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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