Inspiration

Our team wanted to create a fun game for Google Glass that has not yet been implemented, so we looked to the classics--and found that Tetris would be the perfect challenge. In addition to being a timeless favorite, the form factor of the Tetris grid poses an interesting problem with respect to the relatively small size of the Glass display. Vitris is a portmanteau of "vitreous" and "Tetris", a reference to our incorporation of Google Glass.

How it works

Vitris works by displaying a Tetris grid onto the Glass's display, but zooms in on a portion of the grid to allow users to pan between the top and bottom of the grid using up and down head gestures. To rotate and place a piece down, users scroll and tap the side of the Glass, respectively; it will play a single game of Tetris in one round of execution.

Challenges we ran into

We had to implement our own panning logic for observing the Tetris board as there is no native API for tracking head gestures. Secondly, merging the game logic with Glass's Activity API for graphics was nontrivial.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that we were able to have custom panning logic working, as well as a fairly efficient way of drawing blocks to the screen.

What we learned

We learnt that we could mathematically model Tetris in the Cartesian coordinate system instead of using a classic n by m grid of bits to track each piece, making rotations and other transformations very clean.

What's next for vitris

We would polish the game to include the complete set of features in a classic game of Tetris, like tetromino shadowing, a soundtrack, levels, etc.

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