Inspiration
I was at a music festival where a local LARPing group setup a stand where you could fight your friends with foam swords. I thought this was really fun but hated how your hits had to be verified by the honor system. Using VR or AR to augment real combat we can have the computer decide if someone was hit or not removing the uncertainty. In addition to this combat can be improved with things like health bars and magic abilities bringing LARPing to the next level.
What it does
LAVCS is a way for 2 friends to fight each other with foam weapons in real life and have the computer decide the winner.
How we built it
We built the game in Unity using Photon networking, some default photon set-up code, and a whole bunch of fun new tweaks. The art is 100% made here at the venue.
Challenges we ran into
Getting the networking to operate with a sufficiently low ping time, so as to not confuse what the players sees and feels was the first major challenge. Making sure the two players are in sync in the game space was tricky. Hacking together the custom haptic controllers without a protractor and tape measure took some doing but the in game assets now match the real life assets to a high fidelity.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Having the weapons line up in the virtual world was a very cool feeling.
What we learned
We learned a lot about networking and VR.
What's next for LAVCS: Live Action Virtual Combat Simulator
We would love to try this with an inside-out tracked headset and marker tracking on the players bodies for deciding where the torso colliders are for extra accuracy.
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