Inspiration

While growing up, one of my favorite kids shows was "Shaka Laka Boom Boom", where the main character ,the kid finds a pencil which brings his drawings to life. And he uses them to solve his real life problems and It was so fascinating to me as a kid. Adding that to my interest in gaming, I have started ideating this project

What it does

This is a VR game where the player can draw animals, birds, or objects using the "MX INK." Based on my computer vision experience, I have created an optimized "sketch-to-3D" pipeline that spawns these sketches as game objects. Once they appear, they act autonomously to help the player defeat enemies or clear levels. I have also brainstormed puzzle based levels where the solution depends entirely on what the player chooses to sketch.

How we built it

I used Unity and standard XR libraries for the initial level designs. The core is a minimal computer vision pipeline I implemented to recognize the user's intent based on their sketch data. It categorizes the strokes and maps them to the correct game object in real-time.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest headache was optimizing the CV pipeline so it doesn't lag in VR. Also, since this game largely depends on the puzzle factor (the users sketch), game design needed long hours of brain storming.

What's next for Shaka Laka Ink

I am very interested to keep testing the limits of what the "MX INK" can do for my game. I want to refine the AI behaviors of the spawned objects and add more complex categories to the recognition system so players can draw almost anything they can imagine.