RowJam! VR Rowing

Last weekend my friend Edwon and I made a VR rowing game! Here's the video Edwon put together to announce our strange creation.

A few years ago I stopped going rowing in a real boat because of back problems. The rowing part was actually no problem, but because of all the heavy lifting associated with getting a boat into the river, and all the expected work cleaning the rowing club every few weeks, I decided it was best to stop for a bit. I wanted to get a Concept 2 Rowing Erg at home so that I could still do some rowing exercise, but when I eventually did, it just sat idle for long periods of time because I prefer to go hiking or cycling instead of sitting on a stationary erg. I used to listen to TED talks while rowing on the erg to reduce the boredom of moving back and forth and not going anywhere, but after getting too lazy even for that, I decided I needed to do something to liven up using the erg.

Originally I started off by using a small python library written by a Concept 2 forum member to connect my Linux laptop to the machine. I used it to record data, but it wasn't doing anything more than the PM3 monitor attached to the erg, so it seemed quite useless. Since I am a game developer, I thought about gamifying the erg, and making some kind of 3d world through which I could row - I especially wanted to do it after seeing the Oculus Rift become reality and experiencing it for myself. However, a combination of laziness and difficulty in setting up my computer, an Oculus (also, remember that the original OR had giant cables and no positional tracking) and the erg prevented me from doing this. Fortunately, my more proactive friend Edwon got sick of hearing me talk about my idea for a virtual reality rowing game and forced a weekend game jam we named RowJam.

Although I had already managed to connect the erg to my Linux laptop, the setup was quite a pain. Although mac and Linux include Python libraries by default, Windows does not, and not only does Python need to be installed, a couple of usb access libraries need installing, and getting it all working together is not always straightforward. However, I recently changed the backend to be a Python script that uses websockets to send the data to any networked computer that supports the websocket protocol - that means just about ANY computer is capable of connecting to the erg as long as it has a modern web browser, such as Chrome or Firefox, and that also means that simple apps can be developed that are OS agnostic.

So over the two day RowJam, we managed to connect Unity to the erg computer and get data about the amount of power exerted by the user and simulated speed of the boat. This enabled us to use the erg to make a boat in the game move forward, and by adding some simple graphics we were able to fake rowing on water and through space. The head movement was all handled by the Oculus Rift's head tracking and gyros, and although we didn't make everything correctly to scale and had didn't have super amazing graphics in the game, the feeling of being in the boat and looking over the side into the water was really cool.

Unfortunately, the actual rowing part needs a lot of work in order to better sync up the movement of the user in the boat and the movement of the boat. In real rowing your movement in the boat does not affect the boat's movement to a great degree (i.e. if you slide up and down the sliders without pulling the oars), but I'd like to get the boat movement to feel a bit more natural nonetheless. I'd also like to work on a new version that tries to push the feeling of being inside a boat moving through an environment a bit more, try to fix problems with the backend so that many users can connect to the erg at once (even using different applications to visualise data) and try to make it feel a little more interactive than just adding power to the boat through exercise, such as using the Oculus head orientation to steer the boat.

I also have some other ideas for games using the erg that don't require an Oculus or powerful computer. One such idea was to use the erg to level up your character in a game through real exercise. After talking to Edwon about this idea, we thought it would be amazing to use Smart watches with heart rate monitors to detect your real-world activity and level up your game-world character's stats. I haven't looked too far into this, but I think there are already some apps that try to gamify exercise to some extent (achievements and King of the Mountain awards in Strava, for instance), but I'm not yet aware of any game that uses physical exercise as a way to increase your stats, or even generate a (game-world) currency. Anyway, since the backend for the erg now uses websockets, and the amount of things easily achievable in modern web browsers is growing all the time, it should be fun and interesting to try doing more erg based experiments in the future.

Although the source code for the backend is available on GitHub, it's a mess at the moment, so I won't link it :P

I'll make another post as soon as I clean it up and make it work properly. This should just be a case of making the erg thread communicate with the main thread that the clients are connected in, but since I haven't really done any multi-threaded programming where threads need to communicate, it might not be so straightforward... We'll see.