Maker Ron Dagdag has created a lovely Christmas-themed project: a snow globe packed with an Arduino that makes it snow in a virtual world when you turn it upside down.

The inspiration behind this creation is A-Frame, an open source web framework for creating virtual reality (VR) experiences in web browsers. When Dagdag found this he wanted to combine it with a snow globe which already simulates falling snow, something he didn’t get to experience growing up in a country where that doesn’t happen (we can relate).

A-Frame was combined with an experimental build allowing the HTC Vive to be used in Chrome. This was combined with several other community-made VR scenes which simulated snow, the ability to throw snowballs and a snowman.

An Arduino MKR1000 hosts the webpage running the simulation over wifi, and receives a signal from an accelerator attached to the snow globe. When the globe is turned it triggers snow to fall from the sky.

If this looks like a project you’d like to replicate, you can follow Dagdag’s build log which has been uploaded to hackster.io. There you’ll find links to all the resources used as well as the code needed to make it run.

The next step for the project is adapting some parts to work on a phone, and using the Vive controllers to build the ice castle or Olaf from the movie Frozen.

