Fumball

Inspiration

We all love tabletop games and are enthusiastic about the possibilities mixed reality offers for these kinds of experiences. With the European Soccer Championship going on right now, we had the idea of going in that direction. Additional inspiration came from tabletop games like Tipp-Kick and kicker tables. Our technical inspiration came from Lucas Martinic's video of controlling a character in MR with finger tracking.

What it does

Our game offers a fun mixed reality experience where you use your hand to control a soccer player, scoring explosive goals. You have 10 shots and if you hit enough of them, you win (yay!). Be mindful of our goalkeeper though or you might fumball it! Your hand controls the horizontal angle you kick the ball in while your wrist allows you to add some lift to the ball. Copying the gestures from the audience lets you use different ball materials.

How we built it

To build the game we utilized Unreal Engine 5.3 with the MetaXR plugin. For conceptualizing features and a vision for the future of Fumball, Dominik utilized ShapesXR (check here, or Room 73dsc4aw ). The technical work on the hand tracking and interactions was shouldered by Tobias and Zoltan, while Herman fleshed out the playing field and tried his luck with automatic table setup. Peter added logic for the game loop and UI.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the "kicking" to feel right took us a lot of iterations, but we finally overcame it and we think it feels great. We were planning to set up automatic placement of the playing field on table surfaces in your scanned environment, but it proved too difficult to provide a good user experience in the short amount of time we had.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting a relatively fleshed out version of the singleplayer game mode with hand interactions working nicely and even adding some additional fun elements felt amazing! Kicking the ball for the first time made us laugh a lot.

What we learned

To setup a good user experience for interactions you need to actually implement it, try it out, and iterate. A lot of ideas only work in your brain.

What's next for Fumball

More explosions, different ball types with different effects, and a multiplayer version where you can duel against your friends, even in a shared mixed reality environment.