Victorian Circus V – Workshop Brakke Grond

This weekend we were invited with a couple of C-md students for a workshop in the Flemish culture centre de Brakke Grond in Amsterdam, at the same moment that Eric Joris and CREW were residing there. The workshop was about gaming and physical input / physical computing with technologies as Arduino and the game-engine Unity. Just the thing for us, so we (Danny Leen, Tom Luyten, Jim Bollansée and me) packed our bags and set up our camp in Amsterdam.

It was great being able to work with this group of people again because for starters, working together with Tom had been way too long ago, and because we’re usually very concerned with what the final product will be and stimulate eachother in pushing the borders just that little further. Somehow we succeeded in working every day up until midnight, justified by the fact that me and Jim were doing some volunteering (”buddying”) for Crew (and the volunteering always ended at midnight). So the others stayed out of solidarity, and since we had nothing better to do, we worked on our project.

Glasgow Mega Snake from Jim Bollansée on Vimeo.

Looking back, it was still a relatively short period of time to get used to working in Unity and to come up with a good concept. The first day was just spent on fooling around with Unity until something came out.

We also decided not to use the Arduino boards, because Jim and I had already done that enough to be able to learn something new about Arduino during the workshop. Also because I brought my Wiimotes with me, we decided to use a wiimote and connect it to Unity via OSC.

We all pretty quickly agreed to make an “artgame”, a game without a goal, without an ending, but only with a visual/audible style purely for seeing and hearing (and interacting).

Update: Jim, Tom, and Liesbeth (one of our teachers) have also blogged about this.

Anyway, more techy details after the break!

Using OSCulator we sent OSC signals over to Unity, and that’s what Jim was doing most of the time, getting it to work properly. OSCulator sent too much messages for Unity to process, because it worked faster than the 60 fps Unity was doing, and every frame gave us more than one OSC message to work with. We eventually solved it by listening only to one in ten messages, and this gave the most fluent result. Receiving OSC in Unity is also not so simple to get working, but eventually Jim succeeded, by adjusting one of the NuPlay scripts. Kudos!

Unity itself is pretty powerful. We didn’t have to program much to create our “city”. Actually the workflow was largely the same as in 3D-programs: you place stuff in a 3D world and you can assign certain scripts to these things. A bit like what Flash Actionscript 2.0 did in 2D.

Collision detection, physics systems, particle generators, dynamic lights & shadows, all that was already in there. You could add scripts using Mono, what meant that we could program in C# (another first, but it looks alot like java apparently) or javascript, or even some other languages. Our models were made using 3ds Max or Sketchup and they could be easily imported into Unity.

The audio we did in my favorite way: sending OSC messages from Unity, and formatting them with Pd to usable midi for Ableton Live. This was a lot easier than receiving OSC with Unity, because there were no timing problems. We used the speed of our “snake”, the direction (left-right) and the height to modulate a soundscape in Ableton. It’s weird how much effect the addition of (even simple) sound can have, and that makes it all the more curious that we don’t get any audio lessons at C-md. A gaping hole that needs to be filled!

Overall this was a very fruitful workshop, also the voluntary work for Crew was really fun. And another success for the wiimotes, they keep amazing me. Stay tuned!

Tags: OSCulator, Unity, wiimote

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 08:55 and is filed under Own projects, Workshops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.