HoloLens Brings Video Game Kart Racing To Life

January 3, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

There aren’t a lot of video game experiences we can easily recreate in the physical realm. You’ll quickly find that jumping on mushrooms in the real world doesn’t have nearly the same appeal as it does in Super Mario, and we won’t even get into the dangers of trying to recreate Frogger on your local multi-lane. But video game style go-kart racing? We have all the technology to pull that off, somebody just has to put all the pieces together.

Which is precisely what [Ian Charnas] is trying to do with his latest project. Using Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset, electric go-karts, 433 MHz wireless transceivers, and some Arduinos sprinkled in, he’s created the closest thing to Mario Kart that us flesh and blood mortals are likely to experience anytime soon.

The HoloLens headset worn by each driver overlays the necessary graphical elements like pickups and weapon effects, as well as puts over-the-top cartoon heads on the other racers. But of course, that’s only half of the story. Seeing the pickups and gadgets doesn’t do you any good if they don’t have any effect on the actual race.

To that end, [Ian] has come up with a way to control the performance of the go-karts using an electronic “backpack” that mounts to each kart. So speed boosting pickups actually make the kart go faster, and if a driver gets hit with a weapon fired at them, they get slowed down.

That’s the high-level version, anyway. There’s obviously a lot going on behind the scenes, some of which are detailed on the Hackaday.io page. One of the interesting notes is that the HoloLens needs visual markers to orient itself, which in the video after the break can be seen as black and white posters dotting the walls alongside the track. As the project progresses, [Ian] is hoping that these can be camouflaged in creative ways (such as being made to look like audience members or checkered flags) to make the overall experience more immersive.

According to [Ian], the next step is to find partners who want to help elevate this from a one-off project to something that you might actually see at an amusement park. We wish him luck, if for no other reason than we really want to play the thing ourselves. In the meantime, we’ll have to settle for racing hacked Power Wheels.

Continue reading “HoloLens Brings Video Game Kart Racing To Life” →

Reflective Sensor Becomes Kart Racing Lap Counter

July 15, 2017 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

Once you have a track and a kart to race on it, what’s missing? A lap counter that can give your lap times in hardcopy, obviously! That’s what led [the_anykey] to create the Arduino-based Lap Timer to help him and his kids trim those precious seconds off their runs, complete with thermal printer for the results.

The hardware uses an infrared break-beam sensor module (a Velleman PEM10D) to detect when a kart passes by. This module is similar to a scaled-up IR reflective object sensor; it combines an IR emitter and receiver on one end, and is pointed at a reflector placed across the track, up to 10 meters away. When a kart breaks the beam, the module reports the event to the rest of the hardware. Only needing electronics on one side allows the unit to be self-contained.

An obvious shortcoming of this system is the inability to differentiate between multiple karts, but for timing a single driver’s performance it does the trick. What’s great about this project is it showcases how accessible hardware is today; a device like this is possible to put together with what are essentially off-the-shelf components available to any hobbyist, using an Arduino as the glue to hold it together. We’d only comment that a red-tinted piece of plastic as an overlay for the red display (and a grey-tinted one for the green) would make the LED displays much easier to read. Still, this is a very clean and well-documented build. See it in action in the video embedded below.

Continue reading “Reflective Sensor Becomes Kart Racing Lap Counter” →