App Showcase - A look at the core Magic Wonders experience in mixed reality
Select Your Build - Choose your spell loadout and customize your strategy before each duel
Duel Phases - See the flow of each battle—from selecting spells to resolving actions
Spell Resolution - Watch spells collide as timing, accuracy, and effects determine the outcome
Smart Home - Cast gestures to trigger lights, music, and routines through Alexa integration

Magic Wonders — Bringing Real Magic Into Mixed Reality

✨ Inspiration

Magic Wonders began with a simple spark: watching my daughter cast spells with an interactive wand at a theme park. The experience was magical and physical, but it ended the moment we left.
That led to one question:

What if magic followed you everywhere — into your home, your games, and your world?

Magic Wonders was created to bridge the physical and digital worlds through gesture-based magic, AI, and mixed reality.

Kid Casting

🛠️ How We Built It

Magic Wonders is a true connected ecosystem combining hardware, AI gesture recognition, smart-home control, and an online multiplayer game. Our app is built with React Native, giving us a fast, cross-platform foundation for the entire experience.

Smart-Home Spellcasting

Magic Wonders connects to Alexa, allowing players to control their real-world environment through magical gestures.

Players can:

Turn lights on/off
Change colors and brightness
Play music or playlists
Trigger Alexa routines

Your home becomes an extension of the magical universe.

Smart Home Feature

Online Multiplayer Dueling

Players can duel friends in a fast, witty online magical battle — a strategic, overpowered evolution of rock-paper-scissors where timing, prediction, and spell choices determine the winner.

Duel Phases

Hardware

Custom smart wand IC and 3D design
9-axis IMU streaming motion data
BLE communication with custom C++ firmware
LED crystal tip integrated into the housing with interchangeable pointers (Crystals)

3D Wand Prototype

AI Gesture Recognition

We trained a TensorFlow model using real user motion data.
Model architecture:

A bi-directional LSTM feeding into a 64-unit Dense layer, followed by Softmax classification.

Converted to TensorFlow Lite for efficient execution on-device.

🔄 Updates Made During the Competition

Build 2.0 included the following major updates:

🌐 Multiplayer Duel v1.0
🤖 Bot Dueling (AI opponents for practice and matchmaking fills)
🔊 Improved Sound Effects, Spatial Audio & Asset Preloading
🎓 New Interactive Tutorials
🪄 New Wand 3D Model
🧠 Enhanced Gesture Recognition

These enhancements significantly improved gameplay, immersion, and responsiveness.

⚔️ Challenges We Faced

Responsive design adaptation to Meta Quest UI constraints
Gesture diversity → built our own motion dataset pipeline
Designing a sustainable and attractive progression system
BLE bandwidth → optimized packet formats
Hardware microcontroller upgrades to support on-device AI
React Native limitations when accessing Meta Quest–specific sensor data

🎓 What We Learned

Physical gestures dramatically increase immersion
Real-world responsiveness makes the magic feel real
Multiplayer adds social strategy and replayability
Hardware constraints push cleaner architecture and optimization

🚀 What’s Next

Improved dueling system
Player & spell progression
More advanced gesture models & better recognition
A dedicated VR scene with real hand–tracked spellcasting for immersive gesture interactions
Voice recognition support
New elemental abilities
Unified ecosystem across wand, mobile app, and smart home

Magic Wonders began with a spark, now it lets anyone cast real magic in their home, on their device, and inside a shared magical world.