The yearly hackathon at work is always a great time to pursue new ideas or play around in fun ways with existing technology. My entry in 2019 was a humorous take on using simulations when developing computer vision software. I long wondered to see if we could use modern game engines or other simulation technology to augment some of our real world testing at scale.

For the hackathon, I decided to apply my (as you will see quite limited) skills and implement a prototype of such a system.

Scandit3D

The result was Scandit3D, it’s a pseudo-3D environment full of barcode textures and a camera which automatically scans any barcodes it sees.

Simulated barcode scanning on the web. (Scandit Xmas 2019 hackathon project)

Try it out

You can try it out at https://scandit3d.kuendig.io/ or click on the image below to run it on this site.

Screenshot

  • Click once in the main area to start it (click a second time to go into fullscreen).
  • Once the game runs, you can add barcodes via the barcode generator. Selecting a new symbology or pressing enter automatically regenerates the barcode

Bugs & Improvements

There were a few things I didn’t get to implement in the 36 hours available:

  • Graphics
    • Full screen
    • 🐞no message on lauch (“click to start”)
    • start screen / animation
    • blood animation / overlay
    • take screenshots (ctrl/cmd+c)
    • Add screensaver mode (autostart with rotating barcodes)
  • Sound effects
    • 🐞 gun sound doesn’t play (commented out)
    • Background Music
  • 3D Maze
    • better textures (not from Win95)
    • default enable lightening (only on space currently)
    • automatically loop barcodes (press 1-9 to set scans per symbology, 0 to disable)
  • Status bar
    • 🐞aspect ratio of status bar (Doom used non-square pixels)
    • 🐞using AmazDooMLeft for whole logo (instead of just left side)
  • Source Quality
    • code cleanup
    • use npm / web bundler to build

References

Being a single dev and having barely more than a workday, I had to stich together what I could. So no, this isn’t using Unreal Engine with custom bindings for the barcode scanner. Instead:

  • The barcode scanner is the amazing Scandit Barcode Scanner for the Web.

  • The barcode generator used is which is a translation to native JavaScript of .

  • The 3D maze is based on the WebGL-port of the 3D Maze screensaver from Windows 95 available at .

    • The matrix libraries it uses are from (deeplink)
    • Thee maze generator can be found at (Tutorial).

  • The status bar uses the UI elements from and the font is Press Start 2P. The background is a modified version of STBAR from the DOOM1.WAD.

  • The Scandit3D logo uses the AmazDooM font.

  • The gun sound is SPISTOL from the DOOM1.WAD.