The Menace of Space Squids

Competitions / Hackathons Space Competition
#1

Hey everyone!

Here is my last minute submission: The Menace of Space Squids :squid:

It’s a small space adventure game I made together with my girlfriend.

I got this weird idea of using a hand held target image together with a gyro-oriented environment on friday last week. It turned out to be kind of interesting and then I decided to spin it into this small game. My girlfriend got excited about the idea so I quickly taught her how to model stuff in Blender and she managed to produce a ton of cool space stuff. :star_struck:

We had a lot of fun!

Here’s the target image if anyone wants to try. Note that it’s designed to be printed in the size of business cards (3.5 x 2 inches). If you print it with 300 DPI it should end up in the right size. The zap expects the target to be in this size and hand held. I recommend thicker board or gluing it onto a business card.

target

Let me know what you think!

Edit: I hope my submission went through… The website didn’t make it super obvious :thinking:

2 Likes
#2

@slothling
Nice!! I was thinking of doing something like this in ZapBox and now with lighting I can.
Two things.

  1. Put the instruction box in front of the ship not under. It’s hard to read.
  2. Rotate the ship like 45- 90 degrees pointing out from you. Just after the instruction box leaves. I keep losing sight of the card when I turn it.

Steve

#3

Valid points @stevesanerd . Thanks for the feedback.

I tried orienting the spaceship perpendicular to the target but that ended up with a lot of jittering which in turn made it really hard to aim with the light. The tracking would work way better with the Zapbox controller but that would’ve completely dismissed my original idea of finding new ways to use target images.

Did you manage to find your way to victory? I’m curious if I made the goal too obscure or hard to find :thinking:

#4

Good work, @slothling!

I liked the way you can move your phone closer and the ship gets bigger/smaller. Then following the light by turning the phone was cool.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to create “depth” with the Z-space.

Using the Step-by-step tutorial, I can place objects (Starting with PNG in the x,y,z) around a 360 panorama, but, as I move my phone closer. everything stays equal distance. Not providing the illusion of moving through space.

Can you give me some guidance/where to find out how to give the illusion of moving forward/backward in AR space? I seem to be missing how to create this concept.

Thanks,
Bill

#5

Thank you for the kind words @mydarndest!

I think the illusion of depth in this zap comes from the normal way target images are tracked. The space ship is tied to the position of the target image so it will follow the target position in the 3d space in front of the camera view. The 360 space panorama is not actually moving at all as it is tied to the camera position. Since the spaceship and the space panorama are in different coordinate systems and have very different scales, we end up with a slight illusion of moving freely in the 360 environment.

I guess you could implement real free movement in a 360 panorama by not parenting the 360 to the camera but instead moving it based on some custom scripted logic. I had this idea of moving the space panorama with the inverse vector of the spaceship but didn’t find the time to try it out. I’m also not sure what this would do to the gyro-based rotation of the 360 as it would no longer be centered on the device. Definitely an interesting concept to explore, but I bet it would involve a fair amount of scripting and math.

I hope my description helps with understanding the depth illusion in this zap.

#6

Thanks @slothling.
This is all good for me.
I’m experimenting and learning.
Your explanation gives me more things to try with an example to relate to.
Onward!
Bill