LED Balance Board Prototype

For an upcoming client project, we thought about ways, to control a Unity game with your whole body, without using optical systems like Kinect, TOF-Sesors or other similar systems, which might be unstable in different light conditions.

So we came up with the idea of building our own balance board, inspired by the WII controllers back in the days.

To engage users to step on the board and to give them a more visual feedback, we developed a two layered Balanceboard.

So basically 4 weight sensors in the bottom area, to measure the balance and another LED-layer on top, covered with a 1.5cm blurry plexiglass, to protect the whole system against the ingress of moisture or dust.

Build Setup:

Layer 1 – Bosche weight sensors:

Layer 2 – Adafruit LED Panels (8 x 32/16):

Top Layer – 1.5cm Plexi and connected LED stripes:

To read out the sensor values and sent them to Unity, I developed our own Demodern branded circuit boards. The board was based on 4 HX-711 Weight-Controller-Chips and the modular system ensured to plug an unplug Sensors or swap out components easily.

The Unity plugin is able to detect the weight positions, jumps & shaking gestures, which were implemented in our underwater game.

Demodern weight controller boards:

Connected LED stripes between the board and the Displays enhanced the experience in adding additional animations for different events like jumping, crashing or special game modes.

The final testsetup:

As soon as we setup the final application onsite, I will push some more detailed information about the whole setup….TBC