Thursday, March 5, 2015

The Iron Girl Project - Systems Report and HUD Updates

Howdy y'all! Some interesting updates have happened with the HUD, so I'll dive right in.

I've swapped Processing out for the Unity game engine, both for performance and ease of manipulation in 3D space. Unity works much like a regular 3D application, whereas Processing requires you to place objects via a coordinate system. Attempting to animate any elements in Processing quickly became a nightmare, and adding and placing new components was time-consuming. Here's an example of the first copy of the Unity HUD:


Since Unity supports C#, a JavaScript-ish thing called UnityScript, and Boo (a Python variant), it means there's a nice variety of coding choices for different elements. For instance, the scripts that run the dynamic text on the screen are in JS, while the script that pulls in data from the serial port (which is fed numbers by an IMU hooked up to an Arduino) is in C#. Below is an example of the working serial feed.


After a lot of blundering about and experimenting, I took a few weeks to got some actual training in Unity (from a company called Digital-Tutos), after which I redid the HUD in GUI elements, rather than TextMesh objects mapped to 3D assets. This way, no matter what, elements on the HUD will resize to fit the screen resolution and aspect ratio of the target system. (The end goal of this is to achieve stereoscopic rendering via Google Cardboard's SDK, but shhh - don't tell anyone, that'll be a surprise). Examples of dynamic GUI elements:


Test builds are now available for both Windows and OS X over on the download page. Please download them, and comment below/send me a message on your experiences. I have a decent number of Linux and Windows test machines, but I have no testing platforms for OS X. I also don't have any way of testing multiple camera setups, as I only have 3 or 4 at home. If you put something on COM3 at 115200kbs, it'll write it to the Debug Log.

Have fun with it, and let me know the results!

In other news, I'm currently delaying work on fabrication (and to a lesser extent, design) of physical pieces for the IGP suit. I may be moving in the next few months to a larger space, which should greatly increase my ability to produce parts, but until then, I'd rather not prototype a bunch of stuff that I'll then have to carefully box up and move. So expect HUD-focused stuff for the next few months. Around September, things should settle down again and I'll be able to switch to physical production.

Have a lovely evening, and go make something awesome!

Cheers,
~Lexikitty

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