Embedded Development & Embedded Programming

VR Labyrinth, Exploring the Tilt Table with an Oculus Rift

So, my name is Alex Krejcie. I'm a project engineer here at DMC. For FedEx day we had this idea, so we have an awesome Tilt Table demo, we had an Oculus Rift, and we had a little bit of experience with both of them, and we thought they wouldn't it be cool if you could travel around the world of our Tilt Table demo, and pretend you're the ball. What resulted is we made a game using the Unity Engine that allows you to control the ball inside the Tilt Table while wearing the Oculus Rift so you could see the whole world in 3D and look around as you navigated around the maze. So, the Tilt Table right now is primarily a recruiting unit, and kind of just shows of some of our skill sets, some of the technologies we use. 

The game will get the maze information from the ball demo, and will generate the maze that the ball demo already decided upon, and rendered in the game for you, and then as you explore the game you continuously tell the demo where you are, where the ball is in the maze, and it follows you around in real life. Somebody watching knows where you are in the maze even if you don't know where you are in the maze. This was sort of building on a previous idea we had where we were going to control the maze with an Android Tablet by tilting it, and so we've kind of furthered our agenda in that in that we flushed out the communication back and forth for the sending positions back, and theoretically we could run this game without the Oculus Rift on an Android Tablet and give you tilt control rather than on a Xbox controller, or even a touchscreen, or something like that.

So, we're kind of just broadening our technology that is compatible with this demo so that we can keep trying to do things in the real world that it's kind of the same thing. You don't know what hardware you're going to have, and they might have to work with each other, and it's figuring out how to make that happen. We pretty much finished this whole thing in one day, during FedEx Day. So, it's a pretty neat example of quickly developing something that has noticeable I guess return factor. So, now I guess we can show off how this works, and I'm going to take a little tour through our ball demo maze. So I'll grab my controller, and put on my headset.

You can kind of see me looking around the world; see my ball in front of me, and a couple of blue cubes I'm supposed to collect. Let's do some exploring. So, like maybe I should go this way. So I'm going to take my ball and go on a little exploration here, get some blue blocks along the way. There's a dead end, keep moving, pretty sky up there, and some dirt ground. I found a wall, some other stuff. Here we go cruising along.