About

Introduction

Spell Waves is a project for Advanced Graphics and Interaction 2019 at KTH. It's a fun interactive VR experience that anyone can play regardless of previous gaming experience. The player uses their hand controller to draw symbols in free-air which cast different spells. For example, the player can use spells to teleport themselves, polymorph objects into different shapes or summon a tornado. The player also has access to a spellbook which automatically writes down any new spells that the player discovers.

Project Goals

The main goal of this project has been to explore gesture-based VR interaction. We have combined this with a variety of physics-based spells and added enemies and objects that these can be used against. As a result, the basic interaction mechanics are fairly intuitive even for players that have never before used VR. Additionally, we have experimented with different ways of teaching the player game mechanics by placing small bits of game information in the virtual environment and using an in-game notebook to help remember any new information.

The project has also provided an excellent context for exploring advanced graphic effects, physics interaction and video game AI programming. The graphics have been mainly focused on experimenting with particle systems, post-processing effects, 3D modelling and animation. We have attempted to implement the spellcasting functionality in a modular and extendable way which means that, from a developer perspective, it's quite easy to add new spells with a wide variety of effects. Since the project is open source it could provide a useful starting point for other developers that seek to extend the game or simply explore our approach to gesture-based VR interaction.

Technologies

To develop this project we have used Unity 3D as our game engine, HTC Vice for VR interaction and Blender for 3D modelling. Using Unity gave us a good starting point with basic graphics, physics and interaction functionality working out of the box. This allowed us to focus our efforts on implementing more project-specific features such as gesture recognition, spell implementations, visual effects and shaders. The Vive controllers provided excellent functionality for wand interaction, and the controller trackpad was useful for implementing page-turning for the in-game spellbook.

User Testimonials

I could do this for hours!
The black hole spell is really fun to use!
Oh, so that's how you aim...
- Users at the AGI demos at Tekniska Museet 2019.

Challenges

Obstacles

The greatest challenge during this project has been implementing the gesture recognition. More specifically, we constrained the problem to recognizing specific symbols drawn in front of the viewport. Some significant sources of uncertainty include symbol position, size, drawing speed and noise - both from the user's imperfect drawing and from the occasionally unstable VR controller tracking.

We settled for an approach based on converting the world-space coordinates of the symbols into a more convenient coordinate space and then dividing the transformed points into multiple line components. While the problem could possibly be solved using machine learning methods, we did not have time or the necessary data to do this.

Another problem during development was that the team only had limited access to the VR equipment, which we shared with multiple other course project groups at KTH. We therefore implemented a basic VR control emulator that allowed us to test most of the features without using mouse and keyboard. The emulator was limited to testing 2-dimensional gestures, but this didn't matter much for us as we only implemented quite simple 3-dimensional gestures.

Lessons learned

The emulator was incredibly useful for speeding up the development of most parts of the project. As such, we regret not implementing it earlier. That said, it's also important to double-check all features with an actual VR headset as there are subtle differences that may not be apparent until you try the full game in VR.

We have also significantly advanced our skills in collaborative development. Following suitable version control policies is vital for minimizing the time spent resolving merge conflicts and fixing bugs. The project started out quite chaotic in this regard but improved over time.

A final takeaway from this project is that you should always be careful about adding unnecessary complexity to your game - especially if the user won't have time to explore that complexity. We designed the game so that the players was slowly introduced to new features by exploring the game and experimenting. However, at the conventions we needed to constrain each user's demo session to 1-3 minutes to process the queues quicker, while our design was mainly intended for 15-30 minute demo sessions. We therefore had to skip many of the introductory features during the demos.