Full Metal Barber - Material Design Project

In the last few weeks of material design Victor, Nick and I have been nailing down the details of our physical light gun game Full Metal Barber. We completely changed the original idea of using light sensors for a racing game to go with a light gun based game about cutting people's hair. We believe this meets brief 1 since we are creating a custom controller light gun with a giant pair of scissors attached to them. When researching what we could use to make this light gun the clearest and easiest format was to use a Nintendo Wii controller and Sensor bar.

Dismantling a controller and building a physical scissor gun around it was something we could achieve in the time limit and also every member of the team got something out of the project. The design has changed dramatically over the few weeks, for example we were originally just going to make a light gun like a shotgun but paint the barrels to be like barber poles. When discussing this with our lecturer we realised this would not fit the brief as any other light gun controller could be used to play the game.

We then moved onto making a giant pair of scissors which in theory seems awesome but in practicality it was incredibly uncomfortable to use. We imagined that the bottom scissor blade would be like the reloading action of a winchester rifle but that would in fact move the top blade of the scissor right up towards the players face, not only would this block some of the screen from the player but it could be a potential health and safety risk.

Next we had to get clearance to work on the project by showing a working prototype, so I put together a cardboard mock up using cardboard tubes from the inside of wrapping paper as barrels and other cardboard, I was able to fit a regular Wii controller in the barrel of the gun just barely (when our final product is made we will dismantle the Wii controller meaning it will fit much easier) and the Wii nunchuck controller down in the stock of the gun to facilitate rotation in our game. I was able to create a pair of cardboard scissors on the bottom of the barrels which in future iterations I would like to at least double in size and add a pulley and spring mechanism to so that when the player pumps the shotgun the scissors will open and close. We have ordered some parts online such as a servo mechanism to replicate recoil, we planned on using motors for vibration but have realised we can trigger the wiimote and nunchucks rumble features through code very easily.

The way we got the prototype working was by creating a very basic point and click mouse gun game in unity, instead of using a very confusing WiiMote API we found and struggled with for some time we realised we could just use the wiimote as a mouse and didn’t even need the Wii sensor bar if we used the Wii MotionPlus add on which increased the fidelity of the gyroscope in built into the wiimote. To accomplish this we used a program called GlovePie which just connected through bluetooth to use the Wiimote as a mouse which is compatible with both windows and Mac OS.

Now that we have a prototype working we can start fleshing out some really important factors which we haven't got to yet, such as what the final product is going to be made out of. At this stage we could continue iterating upon the cardboard prototype but I believe it would be more beneficial to try making one out of PVC piping or shaving one out of styrofoam. Since the project has already been iterated on multiple times the project feels like we have consistent momentum and I am looking forward to nailing down the exact material through testing weight and feel over the next week.