Pocket Planes | Devpost

Inspiration

Do you remember running around your house as a kid with your hand held out flat, making whoosh noises, pretending to be a fighter jet? That childhood memory was the seed for Pocket Planes. I wanted to use Mixed Reality not to transport you to a new world, but to bring that imaginary layer of magic back to your world. My goal was simple: Make the player feel like a kid again, but this time, the plane is real.

What it does Pocket Planes is a room-scale Mixed Reality casual game where your hand becomes the aircraft. Using the Meta Quest 3's hand tracking, players launch a toy plane from a virtual slingshot and fly it through their physical home.

The mission is simple yet addictive: Follow the trail of coins through your house, rescue "Lost Toys" stranded on your real-world furniture, and air-drop them back into the Toy Box.

Hand-As-Controller: Tilt your hand to bank and pitch. It’s as natural as pretending.

Multi-Room Adventure: Fly from the living room to the kitchen seamlessly. The game understands your doors and walls.

Room-Scale Physics: The plane hides behind your real furniture (Occlusion) and bounces off your real walls.

How I built it I built this in Unity using the Meta MR Utility Kit (MRUK) and the Interaction SDK.

The Flight Model: I iterated through several control schemes before landing on a custom Hybrid Tilt System. I map the hand's roll and pitch directly to the plane's attitude but added physics-based banking to create smooth, coordinated turns.

Space Traversal (Nav Mesh Logic): One of the key technical features is how I bridged "User Space" into "Game Space." I used MRUK's Scene Mesh to dynamically analyze the user's floor plan at runtime. By generating a navigation graph that connects Room Centers via Door Frames, the game can intelligently plot curved flight paths (using Quadratic Beziers) that guide the player through their own home without clipping through walls.

The Interaction: I built a custom gesture system where a "Pinch & Pull" mechanic drives the physics-based slingshot launch.

Challenges I ran into

The "Gorilla Arm" Factor: I realized early on that holding your hand up for long periods causes fatigue. I solved this by implementing a Comfort Calibration system. The game calculates flight inputs relative to the user's resting arm position, not the world horizon, allowing players to fly comfortably from the hip.

Navigation Logic: Spawning coins that guide the player naturally through doors was tricky. I solved this by calculating Quadratic Bezier curves that connect the "Room Center" to the "Door Frame," ensuring the flight path is always smooth and avoids clipping through walls.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am most proud of the "Slingshot Start." It turns the awkward transition of "starting a level" into a tactile, fun moment. I'm also proud of the Wall Occlusion implementation—seeing the digital plane fly behind a real-world couch is the "magic moment" that sells the Mixed Reality illusion.

What I learned I learned that in Mixed Reality, the environment is the level designer.

You can't hard-code obstacles; you have to build systems that adapt to messy bedrooms, small apartments, and open hallways. I also learned that "Juice" (sound effects, haptics, particles) is what bridges the gap between a tech demo and a satisfying game.

What's next for Pocket Planes

I plan to introduce "Turret Mode", where static obstacles fire slow-moving projectiles the player must dodge. I also want to implement Spatial Puzzles, requiring players to fly through specific patterns to unlock "Vaults" in different rooms of their house.