Highlights London Unity User Group 7 (iOS Gyroscope integration)

Last Thursday was the 7th London Unity User Group.

Each month the attendance is increasing, and we’re getting new members signing up to the meetup page on a daily basis.

The success of the event so far has been purely down to the fact that there are so many talented people that can potentially talk at these events. There is a also a broad range of topics that can be covered. It allows us to provide you with a varying degree of talks and complexity.

All credit for the latest event needs to go to Jasper, he pretty much organised the whole thing.

Whilst we had the highly anticipated Unity 3.5 preview from Will and Chris from Unity Technologies, we were also treated to fun and informative talk from Iestyn Lloyd.

I first met Iestyn at one of the first meetups for the previous Unity group, organised by Tim Whitlock, about 18 months ago. I liked his style, it was a no-fuss approach to development, built on his former experience in game development, but without the air of snobbery which can sometimes come from experienced developers looking at new technology.

His talk, “Why I’m not even slightly worried about this whole Flash thing”, was a show and tell into some of his previous work, as well as a peek into future projects. The most intriguing of which was based around Gyroscopic Camera controls with Unity iOS.

He showed a few prototypes using the tech, and his honesty when answering the question of how it was put together was refreshing. “I got it from the Unity forum, someone had already done it. If you want it, I can send you the link”.

No lengthy explanation on the intricacies of effectively moving the camera based on the gyroscope data, just the facts. Even one of the prototypes used to the Unity FPS Tutorial environment.

I did a little google search…and here’s the link to that forum post.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/98828-sharing-gyroscope-controlled-camera-on-iPhone-4

Thanks to the original poster for this! All credit goes to them!

I then played around with it for about 15 minutes, and these are the results…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzPlu_QxeBQ

(The environment is just a bunch of assets I took from our Super Springbreak Speedboat Hero SD project at PLA Studios.)

It’s incredibly easy to set up. You pretty much just drag and drop the script onto your camera.

I did some extra work with the FPS character controller and iOS Joystick script to allow walking with onscreen controls and direction dictated by camera movement, which can be provided upon request.

Hope you have fun with it.