Shadow Shifters

Shadow Shifters

Inspiration

Puzzles! Flatland! Minecraft!

How cool would it be if your shadow puppets came to life? Experience the magic in Shadow Shifters!

This VR experience will help you gain a better understanding of how 3D objects appear as shadows.

What it does

Manipulate simple 3D objects like spheres, cubes, and cylinders to create the shadow of the tool or object you want to create! Match the shadow with the outline on the floor, and see your shadows come to life.

How we built it

We used Unity to create the scene and C# to manage game play. We used the ShadowDetect script in order to create custom detector shapes.

Challenges we ran into

Detecting shadow shape was the biggest challenge we had. Unity did not have a built in shadow shape detection feature, and implementing one with the Unity light features would require a lot of math. The light source was tricky to implement because the shadow detection we have does not work well with a point light.

Merging was also challenging at times when key features of our games are altered in two different computers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully used the shadow detection to detect accurate outlines of the shadows cast by the in-game objects, and compared it to the target shape.

We made Shadow Shifter intuitive to play for the new VR users.