The All-Nighter (Arduino/Unity project)

This experience follows a little green man who just can't seem to stop working hard (or hardly working) and leave his room. Even what he perceives as sunrise or sunset only faze him slightly, prompting him to disgruntledly get up and switch the lights to compensate for the exterior light level. The state of the indoor lights can be seen as emissions from the windows of his tangible house, as well as through the on-screen live feed of him in his room.

The experience can be seen as amusing, tampering with the man's rut, even if slightly, and watching him clamber to do the bare minimum in adapting to his surroundings. Even so, his refusal to sleep, or even take care of himself at all, in favor of whatever it is he is doing on his computer can act as a depressing yet cautionary reflection of some obsession-prone viewers' lives.

Behind the scenes, the physical house's exterior is made of cut, folded, taped, and colored pencil-decorated construction paper. The "emission from the windows" is really a transistor-facilitated cluster of 3 LED's, each behind a tape-matted window. The "sun level" is determined by a photo-resistor looking out through a hole in the roof. These inputs and outputs are managed by a Unity/C# application which also depicts the "live feed" of the man in his room as models made in Blender.

This was of course a learning experience in Arduino, but surprisingly a lot more so in Unity. I knew that this idea was ambitious going in, as I had little experience with properly importing complex scenes from Blender to Unity, let alone the "stop-motion frame by frame" animation look I wanted to give the man. This was done by exporting each frame as a separate model and enabling/disabling them through a script, as I didn't know anything about exporting actual animations from Blender to Unity anyway. Nonetheless I saw it through and I think it stayed true to my vision pretty well.

Click here for a link to the project's code.

Sources

• In-class Arduino-Unity communication exercises
• Official Arduino light sensor tutorial
• Analog smoothing (technically done by the Unity/C# program)
• Unity Project Hub: Arduino-Unity serial communication
• Unity lerp functionality
• Editing "key-value pairs" in the Unity inspector