Based on the popular Chromium game, our concept aims to bring the Dino Dash game from the 2D screen into our 3-Dimensional World. Using real-time heart data, our inventive take on the allows the players the chance to skip their own heartbeat in a game that incorporates physical movement. Participants can play 2 different roles with differing objectives that both involve specific physical movements, player 1 primarily jumping while player 2 practices their throwing arm.
The game intends to present the player with the challenege of competing with both their heartbeat and another player all while keeping their heartrate low in an effort to keep the game from speeding up too quickly. Player 2 then has the choice to add further obstacles for Player 1 in the form of a pterodactyl that they can place by performing an over-arm or under-arm throw. By confronting their own heartbeat, our game intends to bring more context and awareness to our hearts are affected by every single thing we do!
Technical Description
Our project consists of three main technical aspects: the arduino heart-rate sensor, the Wii Board for physical input and a Kinect for our motion input; built into a virtual Unity environment.
Arduino Heart-Rate Sensor
Our team decided to create our own heart-beat sensor using the Arduino UNO and a PPG sensor that detects real-time heart data. This data is then fed into the Unity code. This data serves two purposes, first to provide the information required for the game to understand what the player's current heartbeat is while also modifying the overall game speed, so as to inculcate a game that increases in difficulty the higher a person's heartrate is. This sensor was constructed over two attempts and will be placed inside another object for easier access.
Motion Capture (Using the Wii Board and Kinect)
Due to our concept requiring quick, lag free data to quickly process the moves required in game, our solution therefore was to use two different input devices to process our phsyical inputs seperately. For this purpose, we were able to configure the Wii Board to capture our jumping interactions while we are programming the Kinect to fully capture our over-arm and under-arm hand motion to enable Player 2's physical interactions. This allows us to process both interactions seperately while also making the motion capture more accurate.
The Game Environment
With all the inputs we have, our concept needed a virtual environment to visualize our actions and allow the players to interact with their heartbeat data. This was acheived using Unity as our game engine and the final destination for all of our input data, which was sent using a variety of scripts.