VR Spellcasting
Overview
This hobby project explores the possibility of using gestures in a spellcasting system for a VR Oculus Quest game.
Technologies:
Quest 2
VR
Gesture Recognition
Case Study
Objectives
Our goal was to explore the possibility of an idea for a video game. The main mechanic would revolve around the player drawing symbols and shapes in the air to cast spells. In future, it might be used to develop a game with a similar spell system as Magicka 2. In the prototype, three separate spells were made: fire, lightning, and earth.
The prototype was made in Unity and programmed in C#.
The Results Of The Prototype
In general, this worked well. There were definitely limitations in the reliability of the gesture recognition but as a whole, it is definitely possible with some further optimisation. However, if I revisit this in future it could also be interesting to look into using neural networks – similar to Google’s “Quick, draw!” for gesture recognition and see whether that is better or worse than the current implementation.
Future Projects
The plan was to see whether or not a spellcasting system like this would work for a videogame. In general, I like the concept but in execution it has limitations. For example, it can take a long time to draw a spell, so it would not be very fast paced. Additionally, the reliability is not assured yet. However, it would be interesting to explore this further and consider alternative designs that use a similar concept.