The Orb is a project that has its basis more in my background of electronics than in my background as a game developer.
I've always been intrigued by cool gaming peripherals like the guitar hero guitar. And I thought it would be a nice project to try make something similar myself.

It all started as a project to test a small gyroscope sensor I was planning on playing around with. I was looking for a way to log the values that the sensor read and decided to make a simple logging program on my computer,

But not much later I decided there were more fun ways of reading the sensor. So took my sensor setup and wrote a small Serial monitor script in Unity. This way I could pilot a cube through space using a very ugly object I had put together quickly.

So after a first test I made a PCB with some extra features like a battery charging module, an MCU capable of using bluetooth to be able to get rid of the pesky cable coming out of the device, some extra sensors with capacitive touch capability and of course, an RGB LED interface.
I also wanted it to be as small as possible to be able to fit into a sphere that is comfortable to hold in your hand (6 cm in diameter seems to be pretty good).
Another thing was that I wanted the user to be able to tell which side was up, so I loaded the sphere with some weights at the bottom. This way it always tends to move the right way up. The heft also makes it feel a bit more like a quality product, which is a nice bonus, now it's just the ugly shell I need to fix...

The next steps in the project are making it more plug and play (using the HID interface) and adding Bluetooth support. And as a final touch implementing RGB LED's of course.