Wizardtag

Magic dueling 101 for first-year wizards

Every year, Purdue University accepts proposals from students for freshmen orientation activities. This was my accepted proposal for the 2025 BGR Entertainment Challenge ➔.

Wizardtag is a fork of the Lasertag project created specifically for this event. Purdue liked Lasertag, minus the 'simulated gun violence,' so I swapped out the laser guns for voice-activated magic wands :P

The app isn't currently public, but I'll eventually merge its features back into the main game.

Incantations

For speech recognition, I used Vosk ➔, an on-device speech recognition model. While Vosk isn't as responsive as a bespoke wake-word model might be, latency is still low enough for spells to feel suitably responsive.

Players yell one of three spells − fireball, lightning, or shield − and compete to score the most eliminations against the opposing team in two minutes.

Marker-based spatial localization

I use AprilTags for instant and consistent spatial alignment. Each headset finds the best fit between its own noisy tag readings their known correct positions, spatially anchoring virtual elements and aligning players' coordinate spaces. I compensate for latency with `OVRPlugin.GetNodePoseStateAtTime` so tag reading poses don't lag behind the head pose.

For my purposes, this was faster and more robust than using Meta's spatial anchors, which occasionally fail to localize and are prone to drift over time.

Credits & attribution

Friends and I themed the event as a magic dueling class in a fictional Harry-Potter-esque wizarding school version of Purdue. I commissioned a friend (Keith) to draw this poster, and another (Alex) played the role of a wizard professor giving the 'lectures' (game tutorial).

While I did everything on the developement side, the event itself would not have been a success without Alex, Keith, Andres, & Paige. Thank you guys so much for the hours you spent making this possible!

Purdue University's Fusion Studio ➔ generously funded this project with a grant as part of their student orientation Entertainment Challenge ➔. Boiler Up!

The wizard hat model comes from Kateryna Babych ➔ on Sketchfab.

Speech recognition by AlphaCephei (Vosk) ➔

This project was inspired by Mage Arena ➔ and Wand Duel ➔. Check em out!