Super Smash Trash

The team!

Super Smash Trash

Super Smash Trash is a game built during the 2024 MIT Reality Hack. As part of the Living Harmony track, Super Smash Trash is designed to help people visualize the amount of waste they generate, and experience how seemingly minor decisions can compound over a great amount of people. Featuring a physical controller that mirrors the one used in gameplay, Super Smash Trash is an experience that is immersive physically as well as through visuals and audio.

Inspiration

We were inspired at this hackathon by witnessing the mounds of single-use plastic overflowing the bins after every meal. To make tackling this issue more approachable and hopefully reach more people, we frame it in an entertaining and fun way.

Every year, we humans generate over 2 billion tonnes of urban waste, a number projected to soar to a staggering 3.4 billion tonnes per year by 2050 if immediate measures aren't taken. Our brains are terrible at comprehending the scale of these numbers, challenging our ability to act with the urgency required. We wanted to create a game to help visualize those numbers using the power of mixed reality, to help people understand the magnitude of the problem and how their choices affect it.

What it does

Grab your trusty physical controller: a trash bag - and try to catch the trash falling from the heavens, before it hits the ground!

With each round, the trash increases by the amount of trash an additional person produces per day. How low can you survive in this infinite game mode?

You want to reduce the amount falling from the sky? Try to catch the power-ups - these are reusable products which can replace the disposable products and stop them from being added to the trash. Some amount of waste is inevitable, but by using reusable items whenever possible, we can greatly reduce the amount of trash we generate.

How we built it

We built this in Unity for the Meta Quest 3 using the Presence Platform as well as ShapesXR. We generated many 3D assets using Meshy.

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble getting the 3D model materials from Blender into Unity at first - but got some help from mentors and were able to work through it!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a seamless and intuitive UI and compelling visualizations for an overall immersive experience. We were able to add a physical element which made the game much more immersive and fun. We also were able to add compelling sound effects!

What we learned

Fun leads to fun! We focused on working well together as a team and enjoying the hackathon, and are very happy with what we were able to create. We learned to use Miro to organize our workflow and plan what we could get done. We also learned how to create and use 3D models in Unity and Blender, and how to navigate some of the challenges of using AI or photogrammetry to create 3D models. We learned how to rapid prototype with ShapesXR and port it to Unity, how important sound design is for guiding the user, new tools for sound design, iterating quickly on developing a UI, how engaging physical elements can be for mixed reality, how important it is to have a healthy team dynamic and build team spirit before starting work. We learned how to do 2D -> 3D iteration for working inside VR.