Tosoville: Intuiface meets Unity 3D

Show & Tell
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Inspired by the Intuiville project, Tosoville explores several interactive signage scenarios in the tradeshow industry. In specific, this demo combines an Intuiface UI overlayed on an interactive environment created in Unity 3D. Unity is a powerful 3D game engine, which offers real time 3D animations and a lot of sophisticated visual effects.

How we did it
The challenge we tried to solve was integrating the two apps and making them communicate with each other. Unity talking to Intuiface can be easily resolved with a Local Network Trigger.
Intuiface sending a command to Unity is a bit more challenging.

We are aware of the unsupported Unity Starter Package but we didn’t use it. We just couldn’t figure out how to set it up, and it seemed a bit complex to implement.

We resorted to a workaround. We designed a Unity app that recognizes 1-8 key strokes.Then we created 8 AutoHotKey (AHK) macros that could be launched by Intuiface and would simulate the pressing of each key. We set Intuiface with a transparent background, and now we had two apps overlapping each other, yet being able to trigger reciprocal actions.

The AHK macros look like this:

WinActivate, IntuivilleUnity ahk_class UnityWndClass
Send, {1}

Now Intuiface was able to send ‘keystroke’ messages to Unity, which triggered smooth 3D animations that would not be possible with the native 3D asset.

What’s next
As Intuiface XP are becoming more sophisticated, Unity integration with a simple IA would be the ideal solution. I’m sure our approach is not the most efficient, but it works well (and probably @Seb has an opinion too).

Special thanks to our VR designer Michael Gelon for creating the Tosoville space in Unity.

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Bravo!

Everyone seems to be knocking out experiences left, right and center!

Well done!

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tenor

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"Very Cool* 10 lol
This is a breakthrough, I always wanted to control Unity with Intuiface.
Congratulations Tosoline well done!!!

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@Promultis It must be summer that inspires everybody to do extra R&D :slight_smile:
@megan @alex @marcelo thanks for the kind words and GIFs!

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That is seriously awesome
!
Thanks for sharing your approach and methods, it’s something I’ll look to test as well when i get time.

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Hi Paolo @tosolini,

To answer your question, I find your integration pretty smart and well done, especially knowing about your own development non-skills :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

The local network triggers between Unity & Intuiface is the ideal way to go.

As a developer, instead of using AHK, I’d think about a “better” way to communicate from Intuiface to Unity, either by

  • having a local HTTP server running within Unity and using call URL actions or the API Explorer to create an IA to talk to the Unity app
  • or even going further with Websockets open from the Unity side, having an IA in Intuiface that would communicate to it.

Both these solutions require some dev skills and as we often say: if something works, don’t break it :wink:

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@tosolini This is really cool! Nice job by you and your team, and a creative way to help the two communicate to each other. The AutoHotkey is kind of a neat tool and I’ll be looking into that too. Thanks for sharing as always and keep up the good work!

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Merci superbe idĂ©e et qui fonctionne bien, j’aurai simplement une question je ne trouve pas le paramĂ©trage pour que Unity reste en arriere plan d’Intuiface.
Merci d’avance pour vos rĂ©ponses.

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English & Italian versions for @tosolini

:us:

Thank you great idea and that works well, I will just have a question I can not find the setting for Unity to remain in the background of Intuiface.
Thank you in advance for your answers.

:it: :wink:

Grazie ottima idea e che funziona bene, avrĂČ solo una domanda che non riesco a trovare l’impostazione di Unity rimane sullo sfondo di Intuiface.
Grazie in anticipo per le tue risposte.

(@rvantony1 si cela vous est possible je vous recommande d’utiliser l’anglais sur Community afin que tous les participants puissent vous lire/rĂ©pondre :wink: )

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@alex to the rescue! I feel I need to respond in two languages now :slight_smile:

@rvantony1 I just tested the XP again. I first launched the Unity app and it stays in the background. Then I launched the Intuiface XP which has a ‘transparent and permits interactivity’ setting at the experience level, while the scene background is just transparent.

Intuiface remains on top by default, even if I engage with Unity in the background. No special settings to keep the Unity app in the background, it stays there because Intuiface wants to stay ontop.

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I can do this with the example TransparentPlayer but i cant reproduce it in new experience. In all new experience when i call another application intuiface go to back.

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In my case, I don’t call directly the Unity app, but I invoke the AHK (AutoHotKey) script that engages the Unity app. So Intuiface goes through the AHK to talk to Unity, and that may be the reason why it stays in the background.

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@rvantony1 did you change your XP background to transparent & permits interactivity?
Setting this value will make the player “always on top”.

image

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Hi Tosolini, my company have been working with presentations alternating between Intuiface and an Unreal Archviz application and I found your project very interesting. This year I’m searching for new parthners with experience in Unreal engine to meet our demand for projects, are you familiar with this engine? We can book a quick call to explain the details.

Best regards,
Gabriel Caixeta

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