Senior Design Spotlight - Team MNVR
What do you get when you take the concepts of the popular Hoverboard, a simpler Segway, and the Wii balance board and apply them to Virtual Reality (VR)? A really cool senior design project from Team MNVR!
Gavin Achtemeier, Danny Legge, Blake Lewis, Daniel Lorant designed and built the MNVR Board as an easy-to-use, low-cost solution to the problem of VR movement.
“I got an HTC Vive, which is a virtual reality system, and one day I was talking with my dad and trying to think of a way that we could make movement in the virtual reality world seem more immersive,” says Lewis. “We came up with the concept for a board idea where you can stand on it, lean back and forth, and travel around in VR space. Then I pitched the idea to my team members and we started to work on it.”
Lorant says some elements of the project were more difficult than what the team was expecting.
“For instance, communicating back and forth from the PC to our microcontroller,” he says. “At first we thought that would be pretty easy, like mimicking a video game controller, but it ended up being a lot more complicated.”
Lewis says identifying problems and coming up with solutions was very rewarding.
“Figuring out how to recalibrate the board to work for different people was cool,” he says. “We had a 160-170 pound male on the board and it was calibrated to him and how far back he pushed. Then a female got on the board who was significantly shorter and lighter than him and at first when she was leaning back and forth the system wasn’t working. After we recalibrated it, it worked just as well for her as it did for him.”
All of the team members say they enjoyed the senior design process.
“I enjoyed the freedom that they gave us,” says Lorant. “We could come up with our own idea and take it in the direction we wanted with just a few constraints. They were really good about having people in the labs to help at all times. There was always someone to go to – a TA or an instructor – if you needed help.”
“It was great to see it all come together at the end,” adds Achtemeier. “When all of the components started working, it was really nice to see.”
The team entered the MNVR Board in the bi-annual Spark Challenge – a campus-wide, corporate design competition, hosted by the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in partnership with the ECE Student Society and General Motors. Lewis says it was the perfect end to a great experience when they came in first place.
“It was incredible. It was a great way to end my college career,” he says. “This project is the culmination of all the classes we’ve been through, and seeing it all pay off at the SPARK Challenge was amazing.”