ImmerseGT Hackathon 2023
April 2023
This was the second hackathon I had ever attended and we won the Gaming and Sports/Fitness Track! Though MIT Reality Hack was much more fun and life changing, I felt like I did a lot better in this one because I was able to form a team of 6 really cool and talented people early and was able to execute on a clear and concise vision well. This hackathon also had a gaming track, which MIT Reality Hack didn’t, so I was able to be more passionate about my work.
One of my main sources of inspiration for this hackathon project was the recently released Shared-Space Local Multiplayer feature that’s a part of Meta’s Interaction SDK, so the headsets know they’re in the same room as each other (Though we later learned it works very poorly right now, unless we missed something). I wanted to work more with Meta’s Interaction SDK because it has a lot of cool features, like the ability to seamlessly integrate both hand tracking and controller controls with teleporting and snap-turning gestures. I had also never made a mixed reality app before so I wanted to combine that too. As I and another member were big fans of the Tron franchise, we wanted to make a local multiplayer passthrough game inspired by Tron, where you throw discs at each other in the same space and can see each other.
The challenges with this project seemed almost endless, mainly because we worked with several niche SDKs, some of which came out only a few months ago. As a result, we had to learn by reading the official documentation multiple times and analyzing sample projects rather than relying on video tutorials. Making a multiplayer game also brought a lot of unique problems including difficulties in synchronizing object instances between players and storing/updating player data. Testing and troubleshooting a Quest app also takes a lot longer than normal because we had to build to the quest every time we wanted to test a change, instead of running it in the editor.
The judges loved how active they were able to be with the project, dodging discs without worrying about running into a wall because of its mixed reality nature. I personally feel like a lot of VR games would benefit from simple passthrough features. For example, in Eleven Table Tennis, I am often afraid of hitting shots near the edge of the table because I don’t want to accidentally punch the wall even though I know my play space is safely big enough. It’s a peace of mind thing.
We had a lot of fun with this project and lost a lot of sleep to get it done.
