After experimenting for a couple of months now. I’ve been using a mixture of photogrammetry and Unreal engine to recreate my garden in a VR environment. I chose the garden as apposed to one of the rooms in the house as it had some far more complex shapes and textures in it. It also gave me the challenge of how to represent water flowing.
Below is a quick capture walking round the garden.
Been a long time coming but finally taken delivery of my shiny new HTC vive VR headset. If you haven’t had a chance to experience it yet I highly recommend it. Forget what you know about VR from the past it’s far better than you would imagine. I’ve tried all the latest VR headsets including the latest Oculus Rift and this surpasses them all. This is the only head set currently on the market that lets you free roam around an environment(all be it still tethered to a very expensive PC). Might be a bit busy in the coming weeks exploring what use cases I can come up with programming VR environments in Unity and the Unreal Engine.
Got a little internal project on the go that needs a touch sensitive control system built for it. Been working with an Adafruit capacitive touch sensor hooked up to an Arduino. That was the easy bit but the final end result will be a video projection install. So now trying to get the Arduino to link to an HTML browser to control some animations based on the users input. Looks like the Involt chrome extension should do the job. Then its onto extending the input tocuh sensors with some conductive ink from Bare conductive.
Next project on the agenda involves building a remote rain sensor. I’ve managed to get the ESP8266 up and running before working as a remote webserver. But the rainsensor really needs to be plugged into an analog input not digital. so had to purchase an adafruit ESP8266 module as that has an analog input pin. Took a while to solder all the pins on it but finally got it up and running and connected to the rain sensor. Once its working reliably need to get it to broadcast the analog sensor data to a website so it can be viewed externally.
After playing around with the ESP8266 for a while I needed to find a way to display what was going on with the module when it wasn’t plugged into the PC via a serial monitor. So spent a while playing with this little OLED module plugged into an arduino to start with to see how easy it was to get the display up and running. Answer very easy!. Only 4 wires needed for this module and after following a few tutorials managed to get the display working with text and pictures. Next mission get it working with the ESP8266.
Been trying out the ESP8266 wifi module this week. Amazing piece of tech for as little as £6 from amazon. Managed to get it up and running as a web server using NodeMCU but real mission is to get it connected to a moisture sensor to act as a standalone rain sensor that broadcasts a signal that can be accessed anywhere.