From January through July of 2019, a group of Drexel University students (primarily members of Drexel’s Theme Park Engineering and Design Group and Extended Reality Club) created a 2nd iteration of an original motion platform featuring custom inputs, motion cues, and haptic feedback that ultimately acts as a controller for virtual reality games. This motion platform, titled the Virtual Reality Bike 2.0, allows for a single patron experience centered around three degrees of freedom: passive, user-controlled roll and yaw, and active operator-controlled pitch.
As the lead Electrical Engineer on the project, my role was to integrate an electric linear actuator capable of 560 lbs of thrust, two buttons, three fans, and a throttle to provide the game developers with a means to receive player input and provide physical feedback. The VR Bike was ultimately showcased for 3 days in the Los Angeles Convention Center during SIGGRAPH 2019 where over 300 patrons rode the attraction. Feel free to check out the video below to see the bike in action!
At the conclusion of the project, I created documentation concerning the electrical design and further added insight into what I would have done differently (I made a plethora of mistakes but learned a lot!!).