Love, Loss, and Redemption

Over the past week, we have accomplished a lot. The first thing we did was insert a Firefly node into the chamber of the toy gun. This node contained a sensor board with a 3-axis accelerometer, which would allow us to detect changes in acceleration.

Toy gun with Firefly node inside

To ensure that the Firefly node would fit in the toy gun, we desoldered the default attached battery pack and soldered new wires to the Firefly that led to a more compact AAA battery pack (stolen from a small flashlight).

Firefly node inside toy gun with compact AAA battery pack stolen from flashlight (4.5 V regulated to 3.3 V by Firefly)

We also wired a trigger circuit consisting of a low-asserting switch to one of the GPIO pins of the Firefly node in the gun. This would allow us to detect "trigger presses" and output the A button accordingly.

Complete toy gun with Firefly, compact AAA battery pack, trigger switch circuit, and gyroscope (read on)

This setup did not work as well as we expected. Part of this was due to our misunderstanding of how an accelerometer actually works. Accelerometers measure acceleration, not an integrated velocity or position value. This means that the accelerometer's output will only change when we initially move the gun in a direction, and then also when the gun stops moving (deceleration). This is counter-intuitive when playing a game like Cabal. A simple swing of the gun to the right would initially move the character right and then move the character left because of the deceleration of the movement.

After some brainstorming, we decided to try a different approach for character movement. Instead of using the toy gun for both character movement and crosshair movement, we implemented two more Firefly nodes that were strapped to our ankles. A tap of either the left or right foot would move the character in that direction. This proved to work much better than simply moving the entire toy gun left or right and relying on accelerometer data.

Using a Firefly node on each foot to detect "foot taps" for character movement

However, the crosshair movement was still largely inaccurate. To remedy this, we decided to try a gyroscope. Unlike an accelerometer, a gyroscope is not affected by the slowing down or stopping of a gun swing. A gyroscope's output changes when it detects a change in angle about one of its two primary axes. Using the gyroscope was much more accurate than using the accelerometer.

Soldering a ribbon cable to the Sparkfun IDG1215 2-axis gyroscope breakout board

However, when we finally strapped the two Firefly nodes to our feet and played the game with the gun, we realized something fundamentally important about our project. It seemed that we had lost sight of our original goal, which was to encourage fun physical interactivity with video games. We realized that the two Firefly leg nodes took a considerable amount of foot tapping and quickly became more work than fun. And it was at that point that we decided to radically change our original design concept. Instead of using our legs to control character movement, we decided to use our heads.

A fellow classmate tries out our head-mounted control system

By strapping a single Firefly to our foreheads, we were able to detect changes in acceleration in the X and Z axes. In other words, by looking up, down, left, or right, you could move the character on screen in that respective direction.

Evan makes a funny face while wearing the head-mounted Firefly

It might look odd, but playing the games with a Firefly mounted on the forehead turned out to be extremely fun. And, in conjunction with using the gyroscope to detect gun rotations instead of the accelerometer, we found that we had created a very impressive wireless physical interaction system for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Our class watches a student play Super Mario Bros. 3 using our head-mounted control system

Today is Friday, April 30th. From 11 AM to 1 PM we will be demoing NEStalgia to the general public. We'll let you know how it goes, but from our initial results, we're very excited and very proud of the devices we've created.