Oculus Rift + Unity

I took a course at Harvard last Fall that was aimed at investigating new ways to interpret, conceive and describe landscape using Unity3D. The objective was to develop ideas from the early stages of preparatory work to the deployment phase by interpreting, conceiving and constructing a virtual "Garden of Eden." I was interested in exploring the temporal nature of change, which is inherent in the Garden of Eden story, within the contexts of the ontological universe and our experiences of reality in this universe. 
I am fascinated by the Klein bottle and just generally by 4D space. As a final outcome I wanted to be able to represent the creation of the Klein bottle from two Möbius strips in 3D space that a player could experience from the inside with the Oculus Rift. As a first experiment, since this was also the first time I was using 3D modeling software and Unity3D, I created my "garden" with simple folding geometrical shapes and using the Oculus Rift to allow users to embed themselves into these morphing worlds. My next step is to venture into the Klein bottle world. My mac SSD died recently (yes, I'm surprised too) so I will be uploading the playable project as soon as I dig it out of Time Machine.  

A super early screenshot of the game world in the middle of morphing from flatness to a tube.

A view of the morphing world through the Oculus Rift

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Activ8: Workplace fitness

Activ8 is a system of three physically interactive digital games: See-Saw, a balancing game for Glass; Jump Beat, a music beat matching game for Glass; and Learning To Fly, a Kinect game where users fly a virtual bird through obstacles by flapping their arms aka two-player Flappy Bird clone. In addition to whole-body movement, we capture heart rate patterns by attaching a pulse sensor to Glass to make a connection between the user's physiological state and their context of interaction. Each game uses easy-to-do actions like balancing, jumping, and flapping arms. Leveraging features of existing digital casual games, our games have simple rules, are intuitive and easy to learn, and can be enjoyed in small intervals of time. 

 

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