MVN + Oculus Rift + Unity3d = Ultimate VR

Hi There

Few weeks ago, I was lucky to be able to work on one of my idea and the result was amazing! So I want to share it with you.

Here is a video about what we did at the end, thanks to everyone who was involved:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtMfrkRqlRs

We are a tech company pushing the limits and one of our products is MVN, which is a full body motion tracking system. You can use our software to capture, record or export these animations with positions. Completely wireless system, so you can go outside or under water etc. really no limit!

So, after we finished with our free plug-in for unity (available from asset store), my idea was to combine this cool stuff with another cool stuff: Oculus Rift, in a game. Unity made it very easy to combine them and get a system up and running quickly.. so we were able to walk around in Toscana.. just we hit some walls time to time

We found an office, which was already modeled in unity, so we made a new "game" where people can walk in a 1:1 mapped area. The player have to search and collect objects all around and put them into a box.
We managed to stream 2 person into a VR game, where they are able to move, interact with objects or with each-other. You can go outside or do it inside, walk on stairs, move with lift, turn-on/off switches, etc.
We also made this game network enabled and implemented a basic operator mode, where you can change things real time. Kind of like matrix.
Since the actors has no view, but only what is in Oculus, we made an in-game menu, appears on front of the actor and controlled with their own hand (touching the right menu to activate them).
Each virtual game object is synced via network, while the actor's animations and positions streamed from our MVN Studio application directly to both laptops. (we set up wifi network with a simple linksys router)

One of the major goal we achieved, other then we can play matrix here, that using this technologies no one had any motion-sickness or disorientation after hours of playing. So this is a working approach to more immersive VR and games!

If anyone of you would like to try it and get some feelings about this, check out our free plug-in (MVN Live Animation), which contains information about how to get started with a free demo version of our MVN Studio. This demo version contains some free pre-recorded animations, which you can stream to your own character or export it as fbx.
If you have Oculus Rift, you can simply connect it to your avatar. The movements of the avatar will follows the recorded movements streamed from MVN –or played from fbx-, while the camera will move with your head.

Have Fun!

 

impressive !
have only 1 question : how many does it cost ??

 

This is high grade system for the Film and Game industry, not for home users. The price are not fit for small studios or home users.
However, this is a tech demo, it shows what is possible today with our stuff.
Lower grade sensors are the future, but brings up more problems today. We use 2 system, 17 sensors per system.
A sensor today could cost from ~50 to 5000 EUR each, depends on many factors. (you can build it by your own or get a well calibrated, robust, ready to work one) so depends on the price of the sensor, you can make it cheap or very expensive.
Cheaper sensor => more error, more problems, more work, more time to achieve your goal.