Editor’s Note: In this weekly column, David Robustelli will breakdown the latest rapid prototype he and his team at CapitolaVR have created for VR and/or AR. They are responsible for games like Duckpocalypse as well as prototype projects such as HoloLens Golf, Gear VR Mirroring, and Pokemon GO for HoloLens. Check back each weekend for new prototypes! You can see the previous entry here.
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Fans of the television show Black Mirror will remember the episode “Playtest”, where protagonist Cooper Redfield plays an AR version of the Whac-A-Mole game as you can see in this video. For this week’s rapid prototype we made a version where players can do the exact same thing with the HoloLens.
By combining the HoloLens’ spatial mapping capabilities with hand tracking, the player can hit the mole on the head. When a player holds his hand in the ‘ready state’ – lifting your index finger upwards – the HoloLens will recognize the hand and create a collider on the hand. The hand’s position can be tracked while in the ‘ready state’, causing the collider to always be exactly where your hand is. From there it’s simple: the hand can collide with the moles, and when this happens, the mole will be whacked on the head.
We also tested combining the HoloLens with the Leap Motion because of the more accurate hand tracking. Although the Leap Motion controller gives the player the ability to have freedom of interaction with their hands, we had to attach the Leap Motion controller to the HoloLens. Another thing is, the Leap Motion controller data had to be transferred to the Hololens through a network solution in order to build the application for the HoloLens. We will probably investigate this option in the future, but for now, the HoloLens standard input will do just fine.
This is a guest post not produced by the UploadVR staff. No compensation was exchanged for the creation of this content. This contribution was provided by David Robustelli, Head of Digital at CapitolaVR.
