"THEY LIVE" GLASSES CONTROLLER

Alternative game controller using Unity and Arduino

Github repo: https://github.com/michaelwvogel/they-live

CONCEPT

This project was inspired by the sunglasses scene from They Live, in which the main character discovers sunglasses that reveal the ideological messages that underlie the images with which we surround ourselves; they unveil the Althusserian interpellation that pervades our society of the spectacle (John Carpenter -- heady stuff, no?).

Here's that clip:

I believe John Carpenter copied the visual language of twentieth-century conceptual artists Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. See examples of their art here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=barbara+kruger&tbm=isch

https://www.google.com/search?q=jenny+holzer&tbm=isch

Since Rowdy Roddy Piper's glasses-on-glasses-off behavior is a novel way of interacting with the world, I wondered how this interaction would feel as a videogame with an alternative controller -- glasses that detect whether you are wearing them.

For the imagery of the game, I would return to the incisive critiques contained in Barbara Kruger's work, rather than Carpenter's messaging, which seems somehow tailored for Reaganism while also being nonspecific enough as to appear to critique nearly anything and everything in contemporary society.

PROCESS

My first prototype used computer vision via my laptop's webcam (and a Unity plugin called Vuforia -- many thanks for help on this version from github.com/ponyboi) to sense whether I was wearing the glasses. It was goofy, but worked consistently:

I made a second iteration with a photosensor sleekly embedded into the sunglasses:

This version involves code on two sides: an Arduino sketch to detect light and print the reading to Serial, and a script within Unity to read from Serial and swap textures depending on the reading (i.e. whether or not the glasses are being worn). Find them both in the Github repo: https://github.com/michaelwvogel/they-live

After making this video, I soldered the connections to make them more stable and more sleekly integrated into the glasses, so it ended up looking like this:

NEXT ITERATION

For the next version, I'll use a Tinyduino with a bluetooth shield so that the glasses can transmit wirelessly (i.e. the player won't be tethered to the computer -- and it's way smaller and lighter than an Uno).

Further, I'll develop the game environment in Unity to actually do exciting things.

See the github repo (unity project containing arduino sketch, schematic, etc.) here: https://github.com/michaelwvogel/they-live

Unity scripting was original, but Arduino sketch adapted from this.