I've seen many tutorials about how to use a smartphone's accelerometer as input to control an object in Unity, but is possible to simulate a tri-axial accelerometer in Unity itself?
You can essentially get the "acceleration"(a.k.a the velocity) of an object by dividing the distance covered over time. In this case, that means breaking up a Vector3 into individual xyz variables, then calculating speed on each, and putting them back into a Vector3.
Code:
Vector3 lastPos;
void Start() {
lastPos = transform.position;
}
void Update() {
// define velocities as currentPos-lastPos(change) over time per frame, which gets velocity this frame... will be saved every frame
float xVelocity = (transform.position.x-lastPos.x)/Time.deltaTime;
float yVelocity = (transform.position.y-lastPos.y)/Time.deltaTime;
float zVelocity = (transform.position.z-lastPos.z)/Time.deltaTime;
// Do stuff with individual velocities(xyz)
// ...
// or store in Vector3
Vector3 totalVelocity = new Vector3(xVelocity, yVelocity, zVelocity);
// Do stuff with total velocity
// ...
// Set lastPos to transform.position (WARNING: Only do after you are done calculating velocity
lastPos = transform.position;
}