Sixth Sense

Inspiration

We started by asking a simple but scary question: what happens when you have to move through a space and your eyes are basically useless? Think of a firefighter in a burning building, or a defenseless person walking down a dark and isolated street, or a visually impaired person trying to navigate a cluttered room. Sixth Sense is our way to explore how non-visual cues can guide people, build spatial awareness, and make low visibility situations less scary.

What it does

Sixth Sense is a VR game built in Unity and C# where you navigate invisible spaces with the aid of spatial audio. The experience has two main rooms. In Room 1, you’re inside a maze where you can’t see any walls. Visually it feels like an empty room, but as you get close to a wall, an audio signal becomes stronger and faster, letting you “feel” the shape of the maze and find the exit without sight. In Room 2, the room is filled with objects and one of them is secretly an enemy that only chases you while it’s in your field of view (think Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels). When it gets closer, the sixth-sense audio signals intensify to warn you. You move using simple hand gestures (thumbs up/down/left/right) for movement and turning, and you attack by clenching your right hand to charge fireballs, with color feedback (green to yellow) indicating how many shots you’ve stored. After defeating three enemies, the door opens and you clear the dungeon, purely by learning to trust a sense that isn’t vision.

How we built it

We designed our experience for the Meta Quest headset due to its popularity and strong documentation. Our focus was on exploring novel haptic feedback, particularly using Afference’s ring technology as a new sensory modality in VR. However, hardware challenges prevented us from fully integrating the ring, so we used sound as a stand-in for touch. The project is easily extendable to full haptic feedback, which we believe would provide a richer experience.

Challenges we ran into

During the hackathon, much of our time was spent trying to connect the Afference ring to the Meta Quest headset. We encountered issues such as unresponsive hardware, Unity build errors, and connection failures. With less than 24 hours remaining and no progress on the actual VR experience, we pivoted to using sound. Additional challenges included implementing effective AI for enemies, enabling reliable hand tracking, and integrating all components into a coherent experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite these obstacles, we achieved several key milestones. We modified the Meta Quest to use both hands instead of controllers, creating a more immersive spell-casting experience, and developed an AI system capable of intelligently following the player. The successful pivot from haptic feedback to sound demonstrated our ability to adapt and still deliver an effective VR experience.

What we learned

This project highlighted the challenges of working with hardware, as even well-documented SDKs can present unexpected difficulties. Our team, with limited VR experience, gained practical skills in Unity, NavMesh, Meta SDK, and asset integration. Beyond technical skills, we learned a great deal about the wide range of VR products offered by the sponsors, and how different technologies can be leveraged in creative ways to enhance immersive experiences.

What's next for Sixth Sense

We want to turn Sixth Sense from a demo into a tool co-designed with blind and low-vision users. Our plan is to partner with accessibility and disability communities, let them play through invisible mazes, and study whether our “sixth sense” signals actually improve confidence, spatial awareness, and navigation speed in low-visibility spaces. Based on their feedback, we’ll refine the audio patterns, difficulty, and controls so the experience is usable, not overwhelming. After we validate the core mechanic with low-vision players, we’d like to explore more serious scenarios like firefighter or search-and-rescue training, where losing sight can be life-threatening and an artificial sense could make a real difference.