As for mindKeyboard, i got in touch with emotiv again and we fixed pretty much everything. The problem now is that visual studio is giving me hell and the app doesn’t work on pc different from mine. At this point I’m considring switching to QTCreator but this will likely cause the loss of the ability to type in windows apps. Not a good trade-off but it’s the only way i see right now.

Also there’s a new post about arwave coming sometime in the future…

First, I need to develop a GUI, and that was already planned. The tech choice will probably fall on the QT framework, with which I’m feeling happy lately. This will probably mean the possibility of some customization options and maybe model loading for the end user. I need to discuss this better with my professor.

Second, I’m gonna remove epoc support for this stage of the game life. This is because a series of reasons: the epoc is behind the scope of my thesis and will make things too long and complicated; emotiv hasn’t behaved too correctly with me recently; I can’t afford to spend $500, especially for a thing I don’t believe anymore in.
On the other hand, without the epoc, the game won’t be the same thing so I’m still thinking about re-adding epoc support in an undefined future and I’ll definitely do so if someone contributes with the donations to help me buy the device and license.

Third, I’m going to add support for “scene creation” with different markers you can spread around the playing field representing different objects. This means you can have trees or skyscrapers or whatever that can interact with the game. I’m still planning all this, but a possibility is to offer a fixed set of objects, represented by different markers that you can freely place in the scene, thus having different game dynamics every time you play. Another possible approach is to define a set of markers and let the user assign 3D models to each of them. This will allow for more freedom, but will raise the problem of managing the objects, for example if they’re not correctly oriented, or with a size not comparable with others (too big or too small). So I’m still exploring all the possibilities.

This is all for now. More news will come as I define the details with my professor and start implementing the new ideas.

I was inspired and willing to do something helpful, simple and free, for all the people in need out there.
I started working on mindkeyboard with the free sdk that emotiv was offering. I got pretty far, but there was a problem. The emulator is just a proof of concept, nothing near a real emulator, so the experience with the actual device is totally different and my application wasn’t working at all with the epoc itself.
At this point, someone from emotiv come in help, offering to test my code with his headset and report back. His hope was to get mindkeyboard working before the launching of the epoc in order to bundle it with the headset as a demo application. I was totally cool with that, and actually happy too.
In this period the emotiv guy promised me support in various ways. I worked hard, but I couldn’t make it for the launch date.
Then, someone else come up with another virtual keyboard, that was working. That was the end of mindkeyboard.
I heard not a single word from emotiv anymore. I was also in contact with the guy who asked help on the forum, and he disappeared too. I wrote various mails to both, but no one ever answered me…
I know that the emotiv guy had what he was looking for, and hence he didn’t need me anymore. That’s the market law and i understand it. But don’t even answering to my mails feels really mean… anyway…

So, now… to fix the application I need the actual headset. I won’t buy the headset in the near future, for various reasons, not least because of emotiv’s bad behaviour.
So, the mindkeyboard project is dead. That’s it.

If anyone wants to take over, contact me on sourceforge or here, or via mail.

The main shortcoming, as usual is that the keyboard has not been tested yet with the real device, but efforts are undergoing in this way =)

as usual code and binary are on sourceforge

Another fix is the linux support; it was broken due to the introduction of emotiv code to make the epoc work. Now I enclosed the epoc-related parts of code within #ifdef and this should be enough to assure linux compatibility. I haven’t had the time to test it out yet, so I can’t promise it will work.

As a final note, I’ve finally managed to add the damned smoke trail effect to the airplanes when you get hit. This part was particularly difficult for the lack of documentation I’ve found on both osgArt and osg.

As a final result, the layout i choosen to be fast is impossible to manage and hence i’m reverting to a more linear layout that will be slower, but hopefully actually usable by the end user.
Expect it to be available in some days (a working demo at least, if not the full featured one. it depends on my free time)

The layout of the keyboard is “stolen” from a psp keyboard appeared for the first time in Gran Turismo, if I’m not wrong and then brought to popularity by the psp homebrew comunity.
My application, called mindKeyboard allows you to select one of 9 quares each with 4 letters in the four sides; once you select the desired square you can select the desired letter in that square.

You can get a video of it in action here
The source code is available from git or in zipped package
The binary distribution is on sourceforge too.

Hope someone will enjoy the application =)

Spads and Fokkers first beta

This is a little augmented reality game where you control an airplane against another human opponent driven airplane. The goal is to take your enemy down (fresh new idea huh?). The supported input devices are the classic keyboard and the innovative EPOC, a neuro headset that lets you control the virtual airplanes with your thought!

What you’re getting is an almost fully functional game; the only important thing lacking right now is game ending. So it will never end.
The Spad 3d model is not an actual Spad right now because i haven’t found a free model on the net, so if you know of one, please link it to me.

All installing instructions are provided into the zip package. If you’re a developer the code is opensource and you can get it from here.

Any kind of feedback is really appreciated =)
Thanks for reading.

You can find the whole code there, inside a git repository and a binary ready-to-use distribution which includes everything you need to run the application.
The code is still pretty dirty and there is no documentation ATM, so my main focus will be write the doc in the next few days.

The basics of the game are there, I just need to add support for the emotiv epoc, so you can fly the airplanes with your mind.

Also notice that for now the spad is not an actual spad, but it’s a mustang, because I haven’t found a free 3d spad model on the net. Still searching for it.

As a foot note, if you ever try the game I’ll really appreciate any feedback you want to give me, either here or on twitter, or on the sourceforge forum, etc…

Finally, here’s the link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/spadsandfokkers/

Enjoy!

What you get now is a video strem from the webcam, with two 3D airplanes overlayed on it. There’s also a HUD displaying basic player stats.
For now the two airplanes are controlled via keyboard, but I’m already working in integrating the Emotiv technology so you can control them via your brain.

I’m releasing a demo soon