Robot Maps Rooms With Help From IPhone

The Unity engine has been around since Apple started using Intel chips, and has made quite a splash in the gaming world. Unity allows developers to create 2D and 3D games, but there are some other interesting applications of this gaming engine as well. For example, [matthewhallberg] used it to build a robot that can map rooms in 3D.

The impetus for this project was a robotics company that used a series of robots around their business. The robots navigate using computer vision, but couldn’t map the rooms from scratch. They hired [matthewhallberg] to tackle this problem, and this robot is a preliminary result. Using the Unity engine and an iPhone, the robot can perform in one of three modes. The first is a user-controlled mode, the second is object following, and the third is 3D mapping.

The robot seems fairly easy to construct and only carries and iPhone, a Node MCU, some motors, and a battery. Most of the computational work is done remotely, with the robot simply receiving its movement commands from another computer. There’s a lot going on here, software-wise, and a lot of toolkits and software packages to install and communicate with one another, but the video below does a good job of showing what you’ll need and how it all works together. If that’s all too much, there are other robots with a form of computer vision that can get you started into the world of computer vision and mapping.

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Add Intuitiveness To OpenSCAD With Encoders

The first time I saw 3D modeling and 3D printing used practically was at a hack day event. We printed simple plastic struts to hold a couple of spring-loaded wires apart. Nothing revolutionary as far as parts go but it was the moment I realized the value of a printer.

Since then, I have used OpenSCAD because that is what I saw the first time but the intuitiveness of other programs led me to develop the OpenVectorKB which allowed the ubiquitous vectors in OpenSCAD to be changed at will while keeping the parametric qualities of the program, and even leveraging them.

All three values in a vector, X, Y, and Z, are modified by twisting encoder knobs. The device acts as a keyboard to

  1. select the relevant value
  2. replace it with an updated value
  3. refresh the display
  4. move the cursor back to the starting point

There is no software to install and it runs off a Teensy-LC so reprogramming it for other programs is possible in any program where rotary encoders may be useful. Additional modes include a mouse, arrow keys, Audacity editing controls, and VLC time searching.

Here’s an article in favor of OpenSCAD and here’s one against it. This article does a good job of explaining OpenSCAD.

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VR Mech’s Missing Link: The Phone In Your Pocket

In the process of making a homemade Mech Combat game that features robot-like piloted tanks capable of turning the cockpit independent of the direction of movement, [Florian] realized that while the concept was intuitive to humans, implementing it in a VR game had challenges. In short, when the body perceives movement but doesn’t feel the expected acceleration and momentum, motion sickness can result. A cockpit view that changes independently of forward motion exacerbates the issue.

To address this, [Florian] wanted to use a swivel chair to represent turning the Mech’s “hips”. This would control direction of travel and help provide important physical feedback. He was considering a hardware encoder for the chair when he realized he already had one in his pocket: his iPhone.

By making an HTML page that accesses the smartphone’s Orientation API, no app install was needed to send the phone’s orientation to his game via a WebSocket in Unity. He physically swivels his chair to steer and is free to look around using the VR headset, separate from the direction of travel. Want to try it for yourself? Get it from [Florian]’s GitHub repository.

A video is embedded below, but if you’re interested in details be sure to also check out [Florian]’s summary of insights and methods for avoiding motion sickness in a VR Mech cockpit.

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Take A Bicycle Tour Anywhere In The World

Imagine yourself riding through the countryside of Tuscany in the morning, then popping over to Champagne for a tour in the evening without taking a plane ride in the intermission. In fact, you don’t have to leave your living room. All you need is a stationary bicycle, a VR headset, and CycleVR.

[Aaron Puzey] hasn’t quite made the inter-country leap quite like that, but he has cycled the entire length of the UK, from its southern point to its northernmost tip. The 1500km journey took 85 hours over the course of eight months to complete.

CycleVR is actually a VR app created using Unity. It takes advantage of Google street view’s panoramic image data, using Bluetooth to monitor the cycling pace  and transition between the panorama capture points. So, the static images of pedestrians and cars clipping and distorting as the panorama images load might throw off the illusion at first, but there’s thousands of side streets and country roads out there where this won’t be as pronounced. Check out the highlight reel from [Puzey]’s journey after the break.

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Sharing Virtual And Holographic Realities Via Vive And Hololens

An experimental project to mix reality and virtual reality by [Drew Gottlieb] uses the Microsoft Hololens and the HTC Vive to show two users successfully sharing a single workspace as well as controllers. While the VR user draws cubes in midair with a simple app, the Hololens user can see the same cubes being created and mapped to a real-world location, and the two headsets can even interact in the same shared space. You really need to check ou the video, below, to fully grasp how crazy-cool this is.

Two or more VR or AR users sharing the same virtual environment isn’t new, but anchoring that virtual environment into the real world in a way that two very different headsets share is interesting to see. [Drew] says that the real challenge wasn’t just getting the different hardware to talk to each other, it was how to give them both a shared understanding of a common space. [Drew] needed a way to make that work, and you can see the results in the video embedded below.

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Holograms With The New Kinect

kinect

The Xbox One is out, along with a new Kinect sensor, and this time around Microsoft didn’t waste any time making this 3D vision sensor available for Windows. [programming4fun] got his hands on the new Kinect v2 sensor and started work on a capture system to import anything into a virtual environment.

We’ve seen [programming4fun]’s work before with an extremely odd and original build that turns any display into a 3D display with the help of a Kinect v1 sensor. This time around, [programming] isn’t just using a Kinect to display a 3D object, he’s also using a Kinect to capture 3D data.

[programming] captured himself playing a few chords on a guitar with the new Kinect v2 sensor. This was saved to a custom file format that can be played back in the Unity engine. With the help of a Kinect v1, [programming4fun] can pan and tilt around this virtual model simply by moving his head.

If that’s not enough, [programming] has also included support for the Oculus Rift, turning the Unity-based virtual copy of himself into something he can interact with in a video game.

As far as we can tell, this is the first build on Hackaday using the new Kinect sensor. We asked what everyone was going to do with this new improved hardware, and from [programming]’s demo, it seems like there’s still a lot of unexplored potential with the new Xbox One spybox.

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CastAR Comes To Maker Faire NY 2013

castAR-2

If there was one sentence heard over and over at Maker Faire NY, it was “Did you see castAR yet?” The Technical Illusions team was at Maker Faire in full force. [Jeri Ellsworth], [Rick Johnson,] and team brought two demos:  the tried and true Jenga simulator, and a newer overhead shooter based on the Unity 3D engine. We didn’t see any earth shattering changes from the previous demos of castAR, as [Jeri] has moved into optimization of the Hardware, and [Rick] toward even more immersive demos of the software. Optimization and preparing for market are considered the “hard yards” of any product design. This is the place where a huge amount of work goes in, but the changes are subtle to the layperson.

In addition to her development of castAR’s ASIC, [Jeri] has been hard at work on the optics. The “old” glasses used a solid plastic optical path. The newer glasses use a hollow path for the twin 720p projectors. This makes them even lighter than the previous generation. Weight on the castAR glasses can’t be overstated. They feel incredibly light. There was no perceptible pressure on the nose or ears when wearing them. Also missing was the motion sickness people often experience with VR. This is because castAR doesn’t replace the user’s vision field, it only augments the vision. Peripheral motion cues are still there, which makes for a much more comfortable experience. Continue reading “CastAR Comes To Maker Faire NY 2013”