WanderlustSimulator

Looking from the right
... and from the left

Inspiration

We wanted to do something interesting with the head-tracking / parallax effect, to make the user feel like they're looking through a window.

What it does

Our Unity Art Piece uses an external neural net head-tracking tool to get data about the user's head position and rotation, and adjusts the screen accordingly.

How we built it

We built it using Unity and Open Track.

Challenges we ran into

We spent the first five hours of the competition attempting to do this from scratch with an XBox kinect. Ultimately, the Kinect adapter was faulty, so we were able to get full 3D images and body tracking from the kinect, but it would shut down regularly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of achieving the parallax effect in Unity, and building a few demo scenes to show how it works.

What we learned

We learned that hardware can be really complicated and usually requires a slightly longer time scale.

What's next for WanderlustSimulator

We would build out a suite of more interaction features, like being able to view specific apartments in the New York scene, altering the time of day, and being able to steer around the scene like in a flight simulator. We also see an opportunity for the space scene to become a telescope-like simulator, where just by moving your head you can discover new stars and planets.