Bike rig...ideas?

A Bike basically has two input controls, the pedals and the handlebar. The pedals only offer extremely simple controls. (counting the re arrivals on the origin point. )

The handlebar is like an oversized joystick which can be rotated. This must be realizable with a potentiometer.

The Pebble is promising a biking app. This might be a big shortcut for you, development-wise.

Great minds think alike. I've been debating doing this, but i've seen seen a lot of posts on it from others, so while I may still have a unique idea, encouraging others in this benefits me as it could lead to a greater acceptance to the idea. So...

Ive been debating this, The best idea I have had so far is a leap motion sensor to monitor the hands and what they do on the bars, and wire up a sensor to watch the wheel or pedals spin, or find a way to pull the data from any sensors on the bike. Might even be able to have a leap sensor watch it, but hey they run about $80 each so thats getting expensive.

Alternatively I suspect a kinect sensor could watch the legs and body motions on a bike pretty well.

I think this could be done pretty easily with an optical encoder watching the pedal motion. Most stationary bikes don't have handlebars that turn, but perhaps a wearable accelerometer could be used to detect body lean.

A difficulty I see is that you won't have any way of knowing what the resistance is set to on the bike (or modifying it, for example when you start riding uphill in the game).

"RaveTZ" wrote:
Any ideas on how to setup an exercise bike as an input controller for Unity3D?

You will definitely need head position tracking for this. Your head bobs and sways a lot when cycling and if this is not represented in the simulation, barf-city. Looks like the Hydra will probably be the first to work for this.

As far as modeling the wheel turns, it should be pretty easy to find a USB encoder readout such as:

http://www.robotshop.com/phidget-encode ... eed-2.html

Check out Arduino :)
http://www.arduino.cc/

Kinda reminds me of this type of arcade game.



One of the features is that you have to lean the entire bike left and right relative to the handlebar to control the on screen bike.
Cons are that the handlebar movement is a now a translation (slide left slide right) instead of a rotation.
Pros are that the user has to fight gravity and any force-feedback motors located inside the bike depending on what's happening on screen.
So it feels as if you are fighting momentum when turning into a bend.