In virtual reality, if you can only track the head, it does not make people feel real. For an immersive experience, the body and even virtual items must be presented in an intuitive way to virtual reality. For example, in a shooting game, you want to be able to shoot with your own gun, just like in reality. HTC and Oculus rely mainly on the location of the base station's positioning handle, which is precise, but the solution is very expensive. What we brought to us today is that we can make a cheap version of the tracking handle with only a small amount of money.
This project is to develop a VR shooting game with a small budget and equipped with a gun device that can achieve spatial positioning. Matt calls it The Oculus Cardboard project. He uses Google cartons as VR heads-up and uses the phone's camera to track the gun's position. This game was created using Unity 3D's Vuforia augmented reality plug-in. Without smartphones and Google cartons, the cost is around $15.
Part of the gun is mainly printed on a corrugated board to resemble the shape of a table tennis racquet. A battery and an ESP8266 MCU are used as the trigger button at the handle. The button can trigger the "move forward" and "shoot." The implementation of location tracking mainly depends on the smart phone's camera scanning the logo on the handle and leaves to judge. You can watch the video below.
Tracking the logos on the stalks is not a brand new idea. There were similar projects before, and they cleverly used squeezing to change the shape of the logo to achieve the purpose of input. However, the Matt method uses physical buttons that allow more kinds of reliable input (such as moving and shooting, not just moving). If you are interested in trying, here are all the details and source code for this DIY project.
This is not Matt's first attempt to try the most economical Google board solution. He also used an old skateboard with Google Cardboard to create a virtual reality skateboarding game.