Cheap Saber

Inspiration

Beat Saber is a rhythm based Virtual Reality game where the player has 2 sword (2 controllers) to hit blocks according to the beat. Despite it's large fanbase, there is limited accessibility due to the expensive hardware requirements of any virtual reality setup. So we changed that by reducing the requirements to simply having a webcam and a decent graphics card.

What it does

Cheap Saber is an augmented reality alternative of Beat Saber, with a key difference.

• No swords to swing around, but shields to catch stars!
  > Notes are not hit by striking but by blocking.

How we built it

• Unity The main engine which we used to make the game.

• OpenPose
  An open source Unity library for pose detection

Challenges we ran into

• OpenPose
  • We were constantly running into issues, from getting the plugin to work, only to realise that the original team member that was working on it couldn't run it because of the graphics card.
  • Even after we got it running, it would constantly throw compiling errors as it was not very well supported.
  • It also caused issues with audio syncing due to it's resource intensive performance that would de-sync the audio differently for each computer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• OpenPose Solving all the aforementioned issues.
• Making a game in Unity despite little experience.

What we learned

• Utilising Unity
• Timing and beatmaps in rhythm games
• Pose Detection

What's next for Cheap Saber

More optimisations for less lag and more songs!

Built With

• c#
• openpose
• unity