Above: Touching a virtual fan switches on a nearby spinning machine IRL
"Playing With Trash" is a seriously cool VR/mixed reality project from Alayna Hughes and her partner Pierluigi Barberis at Curiosibot:
This VR environment places you in a junkyard where objects turn into musical instruments. Interact with an old phone or fan, and you´ll hear a sound triggered by a robotic object made from found objects such as bicycle parts.
The VR world is built in Unity and is connected through Arduino to nearby robots that "play" a nearby, real life version of the virtual objects the user touches. "We used open source materials aside from one paid asset in Unity,"Alayna tells me. "We are sending information to the robots hooked up to Arduino." They first showed it off at Maker Faire Rome and then iterated versions at other conferences.
Demo video below. The code for this project will soon be pushed to Curiosibot's Github so other developers can do whatever they want with it:
"I like the idea of using it for interactive sound and music," Alayna tells me, "but a more mainstream use might be training or a way to control objects remotely since this is done over network or to the same computer."
Comments