Hand Controlling Games

Inspiration

This hack was inspired by the game From Dust in which the player is a god character which shapes the land to favor his people in the game. The hack helps the player immerse themselves within the game by having no controller in which one must press buttons. One feels like a god when playing the game with the hack.

How it works

Our plan was to use the Muse headset to control the camera of the game by using the motion of the head visualized by the Muse. The accelerators determine the direction of the head in the x and y direction. The Myo armband was going to replace the mouse and keyboard function of the game.

Challenges I ran into

The Muse hardware was able to create the visualizer, however we had troubles extracting the data from the wave patterns we saw. Since there isnt an API for computers, but only for android, we tried to create OSC server. But this only led to greater problems due to errors in the sample code we were given by the website. The Myo armband part of this project had trouble when programming in Python when the code would not compile; saying we had put in the proper folders in their proper places.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Although we were not able to get the Muse headset working the Myo armband's coding was able to be finished and get compiled. Also we knew nothing at the start of this Hackathon and we were a rookie team. By the end of this hackathon we gained experience in these 2 technologies and in a timed hacking competition.

What I learned

We learned how to work within a team, brainstorm ideas and work within a timed hacking competition. We gained some experience in the problems faced daily by programmers and learned that one should always have a backup plan.

What's next for Hand Control

Hand Control's next move will be perhaps include the Muse headset either working around the API problem or when it has a computer API. There will be more functions the 2 technologies may be able to do with a more intuitive nature.