I’m pretty sure when I was in high school my most academic project was for National History Day and now that I think about it, that was middle school. I created a really crappy but fun news video with a buddy of mine that explored the radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” and interviewed people at a nursing home who had actually listened to the broadcast live. We filmed it, edited it, and submitted it to the competition (and didn’t make it to the finals). Why do I bring this up? Because high school kids today are a little bit more sophisticated than that. Take these geniuses for example. According to Mashable
The students of the Gyeonggibuk Science High School’s science club SADA created the above video to show off their ingenious project, along with some diagrams and progress pictures to show exactly how they made it work. The gameplay starts around 2:33, which gives a good idea of how everything functions.
The VR headset is used to look around while leaning on the harness will move the character (in this case, Soldier: 76). Jumping makes Soldier: 76 jump, and bowing forward makes him crouch. The in-game gun fires when the gun controller’s trigger is pulled, reloads when the pump is pumped, and abilities are triggered by buttons on the gun and headset or motion sensors on the side of the gun.
Everything is wired to Arduino boards, which take all of these actions and re-map them to their specific mouse and keyboard actions in Overwatch. There is a little bit of a delay to some of the actions like jumping, but this is a seriously impressive setup.
So here I am reporting on this site for a living and these kids create an immersive VR gaming console that they built themselves at home with no help from anyone. I’m not sure if that’s motivational or something that should completely depress me. Pretty sure after watching this video again I’ll be depressed.
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