Sunday, June 25, 2017

HoloHack LA 2017 1st Place Winner!


This weekend my best 3d artist Aaron Lutes and our partner Scott Hoyt and I took part in HoloHack LA 2017. In this hacakthon we had to make an experience for the Microsoft HoloLens in 48 hours. I had never even touched a HoloLens before this weekend so I was very excited to get to develop for the device. My overall impression of the device was very positive. Despite the low FoV I was very impressed with the spatial mapping capabilities which made the device very impressive to me.

Before arriving to the event I had an idea I wanted to try where the user would set a world anchor in space while wearing the hololens to serve as a start point, run to an end point, and then save that "route" and time as a sort of time trial ghost. The user could then run against their augmented ghost in a sort of race. Unfortunately the spatial mapping isn't quite fast enough to map accurately while running which means a proper time trial route set would require 2 phases: geometry mapping and the actual run. This along with the fact that the device just isn't meant to be worn during extraneous activities meant this was a no go.

We then played with an idea of creating a course and racing a small vehicle through it. After a quick experiment whipped up in Unity we concluded that looking down the entire time while playing was rather annoying so we scrapped that idea as well. Finally we landed on "Holo Spells". Since we have a passion for spell casting games already we decided to try our hand at a hololens casting game. Despite having limited experience with networking we went with a 1v1 spell dueling game with an interesting gimmick...

To swap spells in the experience you flip through a physical spell book in real life, and then stare at an image representing your next spell. After saying a voice command the game will the switch spells. This was accomplished using Vuphoria image recognition in Unity. You can see how this works in game in our video below.



HoloHack LA 2017 Holo Spells Submission VIdeo

This weekend at HoloHack LA, Aaron, Anthony, and our teammate Scott Hoyt won first place for our submission "Holo Spells" The event was a blast and I'm still in disbelief that we managed to win. We'd love to finish this demo some day if we ever get our hands on a HoloLens again! This video shows off the concept of using Vuphoria image recognition and voice commands to swap spells by looking at pictures in a physical spell book we constructed. You then fire spells at your opponent in a sort of magic duel. It was a cool idea that ended up working great.

Posted by Wave Magic VR on Sunday, June 25, 2017

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