Handrive

Inspiration

I wanted to make a driving game that didn't feel like the usual keyboard-and-controller experience. The idea started with a simple question: what if your hands could actually become the controller?

That led me to build Handrive, a browser-based driving game where the player uses a webcam and hand gestures to control the car. Instead of pressing keys, you interact with the game physically.

How I Built It

Handrive uses the webcam to track the player's hands and translate their gestures into driving controls. A closed fist is used to accelerate, while an open hand is used to reverse. The distance and movement between the hands can also affect the intensity of the input.

The game itself runs in the browser, so there's no special hardware required. The goal was to make the experience feel immediate: open the game, allow camera access, and start driving.

I focused a lot on making the controls feel natural rather than simply making the computer recognize different gestures. The visual side of the game was also designed around making the driving experience feel more like an actual game instead of a computer-vision demo.

What I Learned

The biggest thing I learned was that recognizing a gesture is only part of the problem. Turning noisy real-world hand movement into controls that feel predictable is much harder.

I learned more about real-time computer vision, browser-based game development, input handling, and the process of connecting physical movement to a digital environment. I also learned how much testing is needed when the input comes from a camera instead of a keyboard or controller.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was making the controls responsive without making them overly sensitive. Small changes in hand position can happen naturally, so directly mapping every movement to the car made the game difficult to control.

I had to experiment with things like smoothing, thresholds, movement detection, and gradual acceleration to make the controls feel more natural.

Another challenge was making the game visually interesting while keeping it responsive enough to run in a browser. I wanted it to feel like a real driving game while still keeping the computer-vision interaction at the center of the experience.

Handrive started as an experiment in webcam-based controls, but it became a much bigger exploration of how computer vision can change the way we interact with games.

Built With

• browser
• computer
• css
• html
• javascript
• mediapipe
• three.js
• vision
• webcam
• webgl