Spell Silhouette

Unleash the power within you by casting mighty spells with the motion of your hands as you move through the dungeon to slay the dragon and learn new arcane shapes

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Inspiration

Inspired by HackUPC2026's medieval theme, we wanted to make dungeon-crawling a more immersive, realistic, and accessible experience. One of us has brought a VR set, so we really wanted to make the most of it by creating a fun experience that leverages the hand-tracking and gesture detection, using multiple senses: visual, audio, and motion.

What it does

Immersive Locomotion: Players move through the dungeon using a natural "arm-swinging" motion, simulating the cadence of walking.

Hand-Tracked Spellcasting: By performing a pinch gesture, players draw arcane runes in the air.

The $1 Recognizer: Every gesture is projected from 3D space into a 2D camera-relative plane and processed via the $1 Unistroke Recogniser algorithm.

Dynamic Combat: If the drawn shape matches one stored in our spell library (within a specific error threshold) and is completed before the monster strikes, the spell manifests to be cast and damage the enemies upon a successful hit.

How we built it

The project was built using Unity and the Meta OpenXR hand-tracking late-binding. There was a lot of research, trial and error, and collaborative coding. But also chaos, experimentation, and struggles.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Brainstorming and finalising the idea.
  2. Unity implementation and debugging.
  3. Player motion control and movement vs spell-casting differentiation.
  4. Spell recognition and calculation.
  5. VR headset not connecting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a game in VR - a first-time experience for all of us.
  • Going ahead and persevering with the most complex and unfamiliar of our ideas.
  • Successfully implementing the $1 Unistroke normalization pipeline (Resampling, Rotation, Scaling, and Translation) from scratch in C#.
  • Creating a casting system that feels more natural to players.

What we learned

  • Coordinate space transformations and calculations.
  • Removing controllers can make VR more intuitive for non-gamers, but also introduces new challenges in input precision, which require careful balancing and decision-making.
  • Unity setup.
  • The power of Claude MCP and other genAI tools.
  • The Power of modular code and the importance of maintaining a clean commit history and keeping good communication.
  • Time management in uncertain situations.

What's next for Spell Silhouette

Glory.

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