ASTROGUN Is Like Asteroids On Steroids

Astrogun

As the Jerusalem mini Makerfaire approached, [Avishay] had to come up with something to build. His final project is something he calls ASTROGUN. The ASTROGUN is a sort of augmented reality game that has the player attempting to blast quickly approaching asteroids before being hit.

It’s definitely reminiscent of the arcade classic, Asteroids. The primary difference is that the player has no space ship and does not move through space. Instead, the player has a first person view and can rotate 360 degrees and look up and down. The radar screen in the corner will give you a rough idea of where the asteroids are coming from. Then it’s up to you to actually locate them and blast them into oblivion before they destroy you.

The game is built around a Raspberry Pi computer. This acts as the brains of the operation. The Pi interfaces with an MPU-9150 inertial measurement unit (IMU). You commonly see IMU’s used in drones to help them keep their orientation. In this case, [Avishay] is using it to track the motion and orientation of the blaster. He claims nine degrees of freedom with this setup.

The Pi generates the graphics and sends the output to a small, high-brightness LCD screen. The screen is mounted perpendicular to the player’s view so the screen is facing “up”. There is a small piece of beam splitting glass mounted above the display at approximately a 45 degree angle. This is a special kind of glass that is partially reflective and partially translucent. The result is that the player sees the real-world background coming through the glass, with the digital graphics overlaid on top of that. It’s similar to some heads-up display technologies.

All of the electronics fit either inside or mounted around a toy gun. The display system was attached with a custom-made fiberglass mount. The code appears to be available via Github. Be sure to watch the video of the system in action below.

[via Hackaday.io]

50 thoughts on “ASTROGUN Is Like Asteroids On Steroids

  1. Sponsored by IDF, designed to kill children in Gaza.

    EDITORS NOTE: I’m not deleting any of these israeli/palestinian posts because I believe everyone has the right to make a complete jackass out of themselves on the Internet. That doesn’t mean you need to keep mashing the reply button. – Brian

          1. For me (I’m from Lithuana) those were polish death camps. Even if they were managed by Germans or CIA most of personel both in Auschiwtz and Kiejkuty was composed of polish volunteers. That makes a polish death camp.

          2. Because people kept hitting the ‘report comment’ button and sent it into moderation. Once that’s done, any guarantee on proper comment threading is a wish and a prayer.

            I really hope you people appreciate the comment moderation here…

        1. Oh, come on. Muslims slaughter each other throughout the middle east, but this is OK with you. Israel is strong enough to defend itself from those fanatics.
          Do yourself a favor, take a look at the Hamas Charter, and only then tell me who-wants-to-burn-who (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_Covenant). Pay special attention to articles 13 and 31.
          Then search YouTube for videos of what these terrorists when they can (e.g., in Syria). Or is it Israel’s fault there too?

        2. They weren’t Polish death camps. They were Nazi death camps. They were in Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Serbia and the Ukraine. (this list from Wikipedia, includes internment and labor camps).
          10.5 million Slavs and 2 million non-Jewish Poles also died in these camps. Compared to 5.9 Million Jews.

          But I do agree there is an element of hipocrisy in the current conflict.

  2. Looks like one could do the same thing with a cell phone in similarly arrangement. Accelerators, vibration modes etc are pretty much standard. All you would need is a trigger wired to the control button on the headphone plug and write some shooting games.

  3. Great idea. Watching the video though, it looks like when making small movements in order to get an asteroid in the crosshairs, the device tracks user motion very poorly. That would be frustrating, rather than fun.

  4. Cool project guys. Might I suggest combining this with the Aliens pulse rifle hacks? Could make for a really fun and semi-scary VR experience to play in the house at night!

  5. Combine this with a 3D map of your house interior, converted to a custom DOOM or Quake or Duke Nukem map… This would be like being able to only see the monsters and aliens with a flashlight.

  6. Lcd glass panels are somewhat translucent, maybe if you just get the lcd glass and use your environment as backlight, there won’t be the need for high brightness screen and would work great outdoors.

    Looks great btw.

    1. Haha, I missed that part and was wondering how the hell the comments ended up so awful. People are just falling over themselves to make one-off shit-n-run posts for reasons I will never understand. E-peen? Trolling? Actually thinking comments will change someone’s mind? Who knows? There’s even the token child who doesn’t understand how free speech works or what the point of it is. It’s magical.

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    1. The original MPU was 9150, I don’t know the difference between that and what your’e using.
      Regarding the missing files, I’ll try to arrange them, but it will take me a couple of days. Please follow the GitHub repository.

      Avishay

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