WobbleWonder is a full-on Virtual reality experience using the Oculus Rift! You, the participant, uses a virtual Segway to travel through a virtual reality fantasy world with the fun of speeding while the wind blows through your hair. The travel mechanism is a Wobble Board containing an accelerometer, which simulates a Segway in the VR world. It’s very fun, leaning forward moves you forward through the world and leaning backwards moves backwards. The faster you lean, the faster you move!
WobbleWonder is a collaboration between myself (concept, engineering, virtual Segway design), Adelle Lin (concept, 3D level design and modeling), Takafumi Ide (concept, Leap Motion, sound effects) and Martha Hipley (concept, 3D modeling).
Details
Schematic Fan Driver shield:
Wireless transmitter/ receiver (Freaklabs board):
Components
1×
Freaklabs wireless
communicates from fan helmet to microprocessor
Eventually, we wanted the fans to be wireless, so we used a Freakduino board. Billie Grace Ward wrote the wireless communication system for it and this worked awesomely. Only thing worse than wearing an Oculus and a helmet is being tethered to a computer!
Besides the graphics, there are two sections of code for this project. One is coded into Unity3D (C#) and takes in accelerometer data to control the game (how fast you move in first person). The other piece of code is in Arduino, and processes the accelerometer data in order to control the fans.
I found the 5V fans to not be very controllable. They needed 3.5 V to turn on at all, and then it was hard for the experiencer to tell if the fans were running fast at full 5 V or slow 3.5 V.
If I made a VR project using fans again, I'd get ones with better resolution. I also think the fans on the head were great for photos, but somewhat impractical. It's already a lot to wear an Oculus headset without the addition of a fan helmet too!
we built a nice railing to hang onto, so it was easy to stay on. Without the railing tho, it was impossible!