Piano-Man

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  Seeing your hands

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  Seeing your hands

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  Sitting at the piano

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  Start screen

Inspiration

We were inspired by games in Virtual Reality. Our initial plan was to create a VR instrument game, where players could play on a virtual instrument without the need to buy said instrument. Instead we found the Leap Motion, which allowed for finite control from a user's hands. The Leap provides user input to our game to control button presses.

What it does

Our app utilizes the Leap Motion to allow users to play a virtual piano. Users simply plug in their Leap Motion controller and enter into a music filled world! Practice piano anywhere you have your computer. Users are placed in a whole new world where YOU are the star!

How We built it

Our team of four split up to learn as much as we could about the technologies we were planning on using. Tanner spent time learning Fusion 360 so we could create accurate models of piano keys and light fixtures. The rest of us learned the limitations of Unity and how it's tools could be used for our specific use case. For instance, the collision in Unity is not always reliable, so we had to figure out how to add scripts to get around it. We were able to coordinate different versions of our code using git so we were not stepping on each other's toes.

Challenges I ran into

None of us knew Unity or C#, so most of the project was spent learning the correct vocabulary for the respective tools. Terms like prefab and colliders made zero sense until we got more practice with them. We spent a lot of time trying to get Virtual Reality with the Oculus Rift to work before we realized we did not have a beefy enough computer for it. All that time trying to get it to work would have helped with other aspects of our project, such as getting the keys to react properly on the keyboard.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As a team we were able to create a small room in Unity that looked great with zero prior experience with Unity. We were also able to design our keys from scratch, again with no experience, and place them onto a keyboard that looked amazing.

What We learned

We learned how to use Unity to create small games. This was also the first time some of us had used SDKs to combine pieces of technology together. We learned the benefits of making tech plug and play with each other to create even better gadgets.

What's next for Piano-Man

In the future we would love to get the piano key animations down, so each key could be individually depressed. We also want to get the crowd to react to the music, so they would be a visualizer in a way. Another feature we were close to implementing was additional instruments that could be cycled through.

Built With

• c#
• unity