Your other DIY projects?

I had an odd DIY project for last Sunday, which was creating a broomstick flying experience for my father's Wicca friends....you know you come from an interesting family with such projects.

The two game environments were created in Unity and one of the Vive controllers acts as the broom. I had planned to use the other Vive controller as a magic wand for interaction, but I ran out of time. I used the flexible arm from a clip on light stand, attached to a rubber sleeve over some dowel, to create a mount on the swivel office chair that the Vive broom controller slips into. That way foot power lets you swivel around as you fly the broom stick and the resistance of the flexible arm makes it feel somewhat like holding and moving a real broom.

My father certainly is an interesting character, at 85 he is the oldest student pilot in Australia, has pagan beliefs mixed with some pretty fancy Tai Chi sword and fan weapon skills and he looks a bit like Santa!

Here is a video of my 2 DIY Vive VR broomstick riding experiences.

I gathered all the assets together the week before, which is the most time consuming part. There are plenty of really great free assets in the Unity Store and with a few exceptions, like the wizard tower, animated cactus, venus fly traps and dragon, all of the rest I used are free assets.

In total I spent about $50 on custom assets and only did so as I got interested enough that I am planning expanding the idea of The Realms as my ongoing experimental Unity/VR playground, and may make that available to others once I add some interactions and game play I had in mind but did not have time to include.

I did spend quite a bit of time trying to resolve some shader issues with the Blacksmith desolated village, which is an older free asset, but did not manage to fix them all. I did get far enough that I could use it without risking making people ill in VR. Basically the culling and shadows created what is called VR judder when close to the ground and the grass movement visually jumped when you were looking at it from some distance.

I put the actual 2 scenes together last Saturday night, tweaked them a little Sunday morning and then made up the bracket to mount the Vive controller as a broom, which took about half an hour. Dad and his guests arrived at 2pm and played in VR until 5pm.

I have messed around with Unity on and off over the past few years, but have been more focused on it over the last few months because of a project I am involved in, which concerns re-creating an actual sacred site that has been destroyed. So most of my focus has been on VR experiments around the mechanics that would be needed.

Like anything the basics of Unity are not that hard, but it can be as involved as you want once you get into custom scripts, building custom assets and setting up animations. The relatively new built-in animation tool is great. Unity itself is now fully featured and free. There are great free assets and resources to get you going, including many pre-built scenes and online guides/videos. So if you are interested have a play, it costs nothing.

I find Unity a ton of fun to experiment with, particularly with the Vive, as that is a whole new way to experience game generated environments and fanciful scenarios.