Inspiration
A classic throwback to the old gem Punch-Out, we aimed to combine this nostalgia of punching and being punched by the opponent with the immersive possibilities of VR. But ordinary VR is so last month, we wanted to make it Real.
What it does
Uses arduino circuit and HTC Vive (with Unity code) to provide a user experience never before seen. Essentially, fight against an opponent where you can parry or dodge to defend and swipe at the opponent to attack. When the opponent hits you in, for example on your left side, you feel a vibration there.
How we built it
Ideally we would have liked to use tiny vibration motors placed all over a jacket to provide precise and powerful vibrations all over, but we only had access to stepper motors. So we wrote random values to the stepper pins to make it behave like a vibration motor - as hacky a solution as we could come up with! We then used unity to build basic spherical "boxing gloves" that simulated the opponent and slowly built the design up from there - eventually creating a Julius Caesar sword-fighting game in the middle of a forest!
Challenges we ran into
Setup. Unity was a rather large hurdle to overcome as a framework, especially the design. Also, audio sources were difficult to deal with, as it seemed to have been decreasing our runtime and affecting the gameplay. We also had a pre-existing model of a boxer that would've been really cool to use, but animations were very difficult to handle with that model. Getting the steppers to behave as vibration motors was also tricky.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Getting all of it to work! Fighting with a Caesar we made was an extremely rewarding experience! And the haptic feedback on the body and through the controllers definitely add to the experience. n
What we learned
Unity. VR. Vive
What's next for VR-Fight!
VR-Fight is a small-scale proof of concept of a much larger idea - integrating real life experiences into VR Games. For example when its windy, a fan turns on so you actually feel windy. Water can be sprayed on you when it rains in the game. VR-Fight was the simplest version of this idea we could make with the tools available to us at the hackathon and in this time-frame.
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