VR Spellcasting​
Overview
This was a hobby project exploring the possibility of using gestures in a spellcasting system for a VR Oculus Quest game.
Technologies
Quest 2
VR
Gesture Recognition
Case Study
Objectives
The 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 the future, it might be used to develop a game with a similar spell system to Magicka 2. In my prototype, I made 3 separate spells: 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 I am not sure it would work in its current form: for example it can take a long time to draw a spell so it would not be very fast paced. And the reliability is not quite there for a finished game. However it would be interesting to explore this further and consider alternative designs that use a similar concept.