Schlagwort: game controller

  • Exercise while you game with this interactive treadmill add-on

    Exercise while you game with this interactive treadmill add-on

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Motion-based controls for games have been around for decades, but even with the latest generation of virtual reality headsets, gaming is still done with relatively limited movement unless one has access to an expensive VR walking/running setup. As an effort to get more physical activity in, Iacopo Guarneri has developed a motion-capturing add-on that can be worn while on a treadmill, stationary bike, or elliptical to control in-game actions.

    The wearable device itself is comprised of two components: an Arduino Nano and a six-axis MPU-6050 inertial measurement unit (IMU), which captures changes in velocity and orientation. Both of these parts are housed in a custom 3D-printed case that can be attached to the user’s back via a strap. In the sketch, the Nano continuously reads motion data from the IMU, packs it into a serialized representation, and sends it over serial to the host machine for further processing.

    Unlike how running in a video game is performed by holding the left joystick up, the accelerometer outputs a sine wave in the Z-axis while the user is bobbing up and down, which necessitated the use of a smoothing function to prevent sudden stops and starts. Turns, however, are much simpler, as the user’s left or right tilt can be directly translated into sideways motion. Once both axes have been calculated, the virtual gamepad’s inputs are updated with the new values and sent to the game.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EYHZWyAiZI?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

    You can read more about Guarneri’s project here on Hackster.io.

    The post Exercise while you game with this interactive treadmill add-on appeared first on Arduino Blog.

    Website: LINK

  • Coolest controllers ever? Icy gamepads melt in users’ hands

    Coolest controllers ever? Icy gamepads melt in users’ hands

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    Nintendo’s Joy-Con controller system is very innovative and generally well-regarded, with one major exception: stick drift. That’s a reliability issue that eventually affects a large percentage of Joy-Cons, to the frustration of gamers. But what if that was intentional and gamepads were designed to deteriorate in short order? That’s the idea behind ICY Interfaces.

    Yoonji Lee and Chang Hee Lee at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology) created three devices under the ICY Interfaces umbrella: MeltPress, FrostPad, and IceSquish. Each incorporate ice — literal frozen water — in a manner meant to make use of the material’s ephemeral nature. Imagine, for instance, a gamepad with buttons that melt at an increasing rate as you touch them. Or another gamepad with buttons that don’t become accessible until a protective sheet of ice melts away. The ICY Interfaces are experiments in this kind of dynamic design.

    Each device contains an Arduino Mega 2560 board to read button presses and control additional hardware, like Peltier coolers. Those are thermoelectric solid-state heat pumps capable of refreezing the ice after it melts. 

    The researchers developed a simple game, called Iceland: Frozen Journeys, to work with ICY Interfaces. They built that game in Processing in order to take advantage of its strong compatibility with Arduino boards and the Arduino IDE. The game challenges players to build snowmen, capitalizing on the ice theme.

    MeltPress has an array of buttons with key caps made of ice. FrostPad has a surface with several capacitive touch pads covered in a layer of ice. IceSquish has buttons made of ice-filled silicone balls, which don’t become flexible enough to press until they’ve melted a bit. All of them make use of ice in an interesting way to explore new gameplay ideas. 

    Image credit: Y. Lee et al.

    The post Coolest controllers ever? Icy gamepads melt in users’ hands appeared first on Arduino Blog.

    Website: LINK

  • Voice-enabled controller makes video games more accessible

    Voice-enabled controller makes video games more accessible

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    Almost all modern video games require either a gamepad or a keyboard and mouse, which means that they’re inaccessible to many people with disabilities that affect manual dexterity. Bob Hammell’s voice-enabled controller lets some of those people experience the joy of video games.

    This is a simplified video game controller with a minimal number of physical buttons, but with special voice-activated virtual buttons to make up the difference. The gamepad only has six physical buttons, plus an analog joystick. That makes it much easier to handle than a typical modern controller, which might have a dozen buttons and two joysticks. If the player has the ability, they can utilize the physical controls and then speak commands to activate the game functions not covered by those buttons.

    The controller’s brain is an Arduino Micro board, which Hammell selected because it can be configured to show up as a standard USB HID gamepad or keyboard when connected to a PC. The physical controls are an Adafruit analog two-axis joystick and tactile switches. An Adafruit 1.3″ OLED screen displays information, including the status of the voice activation.

    An Elechouse V3 Voice Recognition Module performs the voice recognition and it can understand up to 80 different commands. When it recognizes a command, like “menu,” it tells the Arduino to send the corresponding virtual button press to the connected computer. It takes time for a person to speak a command, so those are best suited to functions that players don’t use very often.

    If you know someone that would benefit from a controller like this, Hammell posted a full tutorial and all of the necessary files to Hackster.io so you can build your own.

    The post Voice-enabled controller makes video games more accessible appeared first on Arduino Blog.

    Website: LINK

  • Can you become the next Trombone Champ?

    Can you become the next Trombone Champ?

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    The first Guitar Hero game hit shelves in 2005 and kickstarted the rhythm game revolution. While it wasn’t the first rhythm game, its inclusion of “realistic” guitar controllers changed the industry. It wasn’t long before competitor Rocksmith took things a step further and let players use real electric guitars. But guitars are so common; if you want to stand out, you go for the brass. That’s why Greig Stewart (AKA Theremin Hero) built this custom controller for the Trombone Champ game.

    Trombone Champ is currently enjoying viral attention thanks to its quirkiness. To play the game, the user drags their mouse cursor up and down to mimic moving a trombone’s slide and clicks their mouse to blow air. Like Guitar Hero and most other rhythm games, the goal is to hit the notes with the most accuracy possible. But Theremin Hero correctly surmised that moving a mouse is nothing like playing a real trombone, so he converted a cheap trombone kazoo toy into a controller for Trombone Champ.

    The toy kazoo looks like a tiny trombone and the slider does alter the pitch, but it isn’t tuned at all and so analyzing the pitch isn’t useful. So Theremin Hero chose to tie the toy’s slider position to the mouse cursor position in the Y axis and any sound coming from the kazoo triggers a mouse click. Their custom computer software handles the latter by listening through any microphone connected to the computer, but monitoring the slider position was more difficult and required an Arduino.

    To get an accurate measurement of the slider position, Theremin Hero used an Arduino Nano board and a VL53L1X Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensor. ToF sensors work like one-dimensional LIDAR and calculates distance by measuring the time it takes for a laser pulse to bounce off an object and return to the sensor. The ToF sensor calculates the distance and the Arduino sends that data to the computer software via Serial. The software then translates the distance into a coordinate for the mouse cursor.

    As you can see, this works very well and looks like a lot of fun to play.

    Boards:Nano
    Categories:Arduino

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    Website: LINK

  • Playing Elden Ring with a TV remote

    Playing Elden Ring with a TV remote

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    Arduino Team — April 1st, 2022

    In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of it, Elden Ring is currently the hottest game in the world. It’s an open world RPG made by From Software — the same company that is infamous for making the incredibly difficult Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne games. Elden Ring is no less difficult, which is why it is amazing that ZiedYT was able to play using a TV remote converted into video game controller with an Arduino.

    While some modern remotes for smart TVs utilize Bluetooth or WiFi connections, traditional remotes work via infrared. These remotes contain an infrared emitter that pulses an invisible light in a specific pattern corresponding to a command, which the TV reads with a built-in infrared receiver. The “volume up” button, for example, will cause the remote to emit an infrared code distinct from the “channel down” button, and so on. While the code is modulated as a very rapid sequence of flashes, it is still a relatively slow process—something that spells death in any “Soulsborne” game.

    To use a TV remote for gaming, ZiedYT first needed a way to read the unique infrared codes corresponding to each button. For that, he used an Arduino Uno paired with an infrared receiver. Several libraries exist for this purpose and make it easy to decipher infrared codes. The Arduino then tells the connected computer via Serial which button was pressed. ZiedYT wrote a script to read that Serial data and then simulate the proper button press on an emulated gamepad. As far as Elden Ring is concerned, ZiedYT is playing with a standard controller.

    This setup lets ZiedYT move his character around, slash with his sword, drink Estus flasks (ehm, or Flasks of Crimson Tears, that is), and everything else. Of course, it also makes the game even harder to play than normal, so only the most masochistic gamers will want to perform this hack themselves.

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    Website: LINK

  • Converting a Fat Cat plushie into a controller for Final Fantasy XIV

    Converting a Fat Cat plushie into a controller for Final Fantasy XIV

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Arduino Team — November 26th, 2021

    Mounts in the video game Final Fantasy XIV act like how cars or horses do in our world since they allow players to travel around the map much faster than would otherwise be possible. But even better, mounts are ways to express personality and have some fun, which is especially evident with the infamous “Fatter Cat” mount, as it got so widely beloved that Square Enix, the game’s publisher, decided to start selling a plushie version of it in their store. 

    With his own Fatter Cat cushion, FFXIV modder Louis Hamilton (SuperLouis64 on YouTube) decided to add some extra functionality by attaching both a touch sensor and a passive infrared module that lets it sense when someone has sat on it. This in turn causes an Arduino Micro board to send out a keystroke that activates a macro in the game, thus causing the Fatter Cat mount to appear. 

    You can watch SuperLouis64’s video below for a short demonstration of how this fun system works.

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    Website: LINK

  • Creating a physical game controller with Arduino

    Creating a physical game controller with Arduino

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Creating a physical game controller with Arduino

    Arduino Team — September 3rd, 2019

    Steven Goodwin wrote a JavaScript game called Space Bounce where a character in a space suit has to jump from one side of a mine shaft to another, collecting roughly star-shaped objects, while avoiding spikes. It’s a simple yet rather entertaining game, and since there’s really only one type of interaction (jumping) he decided to make things a bit more interesting by adding a physical controller.

    His custom device employs a pair of pressure pads on the ground to sense a player standing on one or the other, and when one’s feet leave the mat, the on-screen player jumps to the opposite wall. Players must then recover and balance on the other mat, and jump back when needed.

    An Arduino senses this interaction using the standard Firmata firmware, and a PC running the Johnny-Five library and a Node server passes commands onto the game itself via WebSockets.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd82hZeIhYs?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375]

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    Website: LINK

  • Xbox One wird noch besser: Erstes System Update im Februar

    Xbox One wird noch besser: Erstes System Update im Februar

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    System Update für Xbox One:

    Erweiterte Funktionalität für die neue Generation wird ab 11. Februar ausgerollt

    sxyvb

     

    Ab der kommenden Woche werden mehrere Produkt Updates für Xbox One erscheinen. Das Xbox Team fühlt sich sehr geehrt über das umfangreiche Gameplay und die vielen unterhaltsamen Spielstunden, die Fans seit Launch investiert haben. Auch das Feedback der Spieler wurde dankend entgegengenommen und es wurde hart daran gearbeitet, dieses umzusetzen und in der Xbox One einzubinden.

    (mehr …)