Let’s connect the SimpleThimble to Unity and Leap Motion

Download the SimpleThimble unity project

You can proceed to download the Unity project to use the SimpleThimble here. Once you downloaded this compressed file, you can extract the folder named “simplethimble” and open it with Unity 2020.3.28f1. Make sure to open the project in unity hub and select the correct version of the IDE before opening it:

once you opened the project you should see this page of the IDE:

Now the only important thing to do is to insert the correct number of COM port inside the C# script that you will find in the path “Assets/espwrite.cs”. You can open it by double clicking its icon in the project folder box of the IDE and this will be opened in Visual studio IDE. you should modify the COM number which is at line 14, according to the enumeration you computer gave to the ESP32 based dongle.

In this case my dongle was numbered as COM21. Now make sure to connect both the ESP32 dongle and the Leap Motion to your computer and then open the Unity project. Now click on Game then Maximize on play and the click the play button.

Now you should be able to see your hand in the scene when moving your hand on top of the Leap Motion. By battery powering the thimbles and touching the cube in the VR they should move as shown hereafter:

The final step is to wear the thimbles, grasp the red cube and you will feel the cutaneous haptic feedback of touching the virtual cube! If the cube falls outside the workspace of the Leap Motion you can press the button “r” on your keyboard to reset the cube to its initial position.