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Actual gameplay in Meta's Immersive Web Emulator: a close-up reveal for the felt audience.
Inspiration
Every stage magician learns the same secret: the audience looks where you look. A headset can make that attention visible, while hand tracking lets your hands work independently. Sleight of Eye turns misdirection into the game itself.
What it does
You are a close-up magician at a midnight café. A tiny felt audience watches your velvet mat. Glance toward the music box and the fox kits turn with you; while they look away, pinch to palm a coin. Look back, then poke a volunteer's ear to pull it out.
Three acts add different spectators and attention rules. The magpie ignores your eyes and follows what shines, so you distract her with a candle. Sir Brock watches your hands until sustained eye contact makes him blush. The finale combines a firework with a pocket watch that rises from a cupcake.
Getting caught rewinds the beat without a penalty. Finish for a newspaper review and a café-wall poster. The whole show is seated and hands-first. Easy Audience relaxes timing, and Assist supports the show with gaze and a pinch using either hand.
How we built it
Meta's Immersive Web SDK powers a WebXR experience served from a public URL. Quest uses filtered head direction for gaze; the app also samples an eye-gaze input source when the runtime provides one. Raw hand joints drive pinch and poke interactions, with tracking-loss recovery and checkpoints.
The café, puppets, props, materials, effects, music and foley are procedural. Spectators combine attention rules, sight cones and reactions so the player can read who is watching. Reused geometry, batched effects and cached transforms limit rendering work.
Development used Codex coding assistance and independent reviews. The trailer uses the supplied ElevenLabs narration with captions. Automated tests drive real emulated hand and gaze input through all three acts, success and caught paths, pause/resume, audio lifecycle, saves, and Exit/re-entry. The demo footage is captured in Meta's Immersive Web Emulator. Emulator measurements and geometric glasses-view checks are useful evidence, but do not establish physical Quest performance or glasses hardware compatibility.
Challenges
Making attention readable without constant instructions, separating gaze from hand movement, and keeping the props visible while the player glances toward a distraction. Audio also needed to stop cleanly on catches, pauses and Exit, then resume with the show.
What's next
Physical Quest playtesting, broader accessibility feedback, more tricks and spectator personalities, and a shareable review card.
Try it
Open the play link in Quest Browser, enable hand tracking, sit comfortably and enter the show. Follow Act I's demonstration; the table plaques provide Assist, Easy Audience, recentering and Exit.
Built With
- meta-immersive-web-sdk
- three.js
- typescript
- vite
- webaudio
- webxr