Riding a Bicycle through VR Skyrim

I’m trying to get a little more exercise, but it’s incredibly boring, so i figured I’d make things a little more interesting by riding my bike through Skyrim.

I use an HTC Vive VR headset to play a lot of games. It’s a great headset with some great games available for it, and by using an add-on driver called VorpX I can also use it for a bunch of games that were never even designed for VR. One of them is Bethesda’s epic sandbox fantasy game Skyrim. One day while strolling around Skyrim I got to thinking it would be a nice place to ride my bike. The run speed in Skyrim (and every other first person game) is really pretty fast, more like the speed of a leisurely bike ride. So I went down to my workshop to see if I could get make a little magic.

The heart of this rig is a USB device called Makey Makey. It’s a programmable Arduino device that you can attach contacts to and have them sent to your PC as keyboard and mouse inputs. All you have to do is clip a wire to the ground input on the Makey Makey with an alligator clip, clip another to one of the control connections, and anytime the two touch is sends a button press to the computer as if it came from a mouse or keyboard.

The basic alligator clip spots on the Makey Makey are setup for arrow keys, mouse click, and spacebar by default, but on the back are a number of breadboard sockets were you can stick more wires to control WASDFG and mouse movement, scroll, and buttons. Also, if none of these are the connections you need you can reprogram it by editing a simple ini file to make them be any thing you want.

So I built a little breadboard circuit with four buttons to control Forward(W), Backward(S), Left Mouse Button, and Right Mouse Button. On one side I added and On/Off switch connected to Forward to I could set it to auto-run. As far as electronics projects go this is dead simple. Just plug the buttons into the board and use some jumper wires to route them to the plug wires running to the Makey Makey. For the ground connection I used jumpers to connect to a common ground that I wired to the Makey Makey. Finally I added a pair of contacts made of aluminium foil and some wire to the bike frame so that when I turned the handle bars left and right it would close the Mouse Left and Mouse Right contacts. The bike it self is locked into a stationary training stand that holds it upright and provides resistance.

Finally I zip-tied my controller board and the Makey Makey to the handle bars, plugged the whole contraption into my PC, and took it for a spin. To my great surprise and pleasure it all worked perfectly on the first try. Steering in Skyrim is a little wierd, since both my head movement AND the handle bars control left/right. So for shallow turns I just look into the turn like one would naturally, for sharper turns I need to turn the handle bars in bursts to line up with the path. I took a relaxing ride from Solitude to Riften on my first go and didn’t get eaten by anything (this time).

Verdict: Not a hard build and a lot of fun for stationary riding.