Unmelted Snowman VR

Unity Leap Motion HTC Vive 3D Printing SketchUp C# Handset Detection

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Inspiration

Winter ends with melted snowmen. Thanks to Leap Motion and HTC Vive, it is now possible for players to keep the snowman unmelted by simply moving their fingers in any hand position, throwing snowballs to the snowman to stop it from melting.

Highlight

At present, players need to keep their hand position stable as the Leap Motion sensors are fixed on ground, which makes them tired with soar arms after minutes of game.

With our work, players no longer need to keep hand position stable, because our device is attached to their arms. The position of their hands does not change relative to the VR sensors, and players can control in any handset: hands up, lateral raise, hands down, or whatever gesture relaxing.

Arm-attached VR sensors

Tech in use

  • VR devices:
    • Leap Motion (Hand gesture Recognition)
    • HTC Vive (Positioning and VR display)
  • Engine: Unity 3D
  • 3D models designed in SketchUp
  • Entities created by 3D printing

How to play

  1. Grasp a snowball naturally
  2. Aim and throw
  3. Snowman begins melting if no snowball hits it for a moment
  4. Difficulty rises up as temperature is increasing
  5. Game over if the snowman is melted -- Spring is coming!

What challenges we ran into

  1. The 3D printer malfunctioned on the first day. Facing this challenge, we changed the procedure and skipped using printers until you nicely fixed the problem and made printers work again! During the malfucntion, we tried whatever we could find, including wasted cans and cups. Here is our gratitude to all the staff.

  2. It took a long time to build 3D models on SketchUp.com. To compensate for it, we coded very fast with the assistance of Unity 3D engine.

What we learned

  1. The power of Unity 3D
  2. Use 3D printers to build custome entities
  3. Learn SketchUp, a modern tool for modeling other than SolidWorks

Story behind

Motivation

We were fascinated by the magnificent snowy scenery on our arrival in Helsinki. However, the snow is fragile as it can be easily melted. So is a snowman. It seems snowman contradicts "melt", the topic of the Game Jam. But we believe that the advancement in VR technology is making our imagine possible, and unmelted snowman is no exception, at least in the virtual world.

The game we design, therefore, allows players to make snowmen out of virtual snowballs, by precisely throwing them onto the snowman.

What's new

It would be an experience different from dragging mouse or raising arms in front of VR cameras. We think players are too lazy to use such tiring methods of control.

What they need is a natural and relaxing experience, in which they put their hands in natural positions, and the VR device would still be able to detect handsets. If so, the players no longer have to stand at attention during the game.

What we've done

We managed to implement this idea by combing VR hardware, Unity engine, as well as 3D printing (for entity parts). Welcome to Unmelted Snowman VR!

About us

Our team is made up of five Engineering undergrads from Tsinghua University, China. The name PentaJunct, which literally means "five junctions", is actually a pun: it not only refers to five Junction participants, but is also where we are from, because it's the place where THU campus is located -- 5th Junction.

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