Magic Hand & Magic Cube

The Magic Hand and Magic Cube were built in 24 hours at MakeNTU, a hackathon combining software and hardware.

Motivation

As senior students, we sat through countless meetings — individual, group, and project — and noticed a recurring problem: poor presenter-attendee interaction, especially in larger groups. The Magic Hand and Magic Cube tackle this from both sides of the room.

Design

Magic Hand

The Magic Hand pairs a depth camera with a projector. OpenCV captures the presenter’s hand movements and turns them into a controller — gestures switch between pointer, highlighter, and zoom tools, while the cursor tracks the presenter’s hand on the projection board in real time.

This frees the presenter from holding a clicker or pen, leaving both hands available for demonstrations. The tracking system supports multiple people and arms, making discussions and handoffs seamless.

Pointer demo

Magic Cube

The Magic Cube is a 15×15×35 mm device packing an ESP32, gyroscope, LED, vibration motor, and LiPo battery — small enough for every attendee to hold one.

The presenter can trigger roll call by cube ID; the target cube vibrates and lights up. For voting, attendees simply orient the cube — the gyroscope reads the orientation and sends the vote to a central controller over MQTT. Votes can be anonymous or named. Compared to pulling out a phone (which inevitably becomes a distraction), the cube keeps the room focused.

Voting demo

Roll call demo

Presentation Slides

Results

The project won Best Application Award and 3rd Place in the Enterprise Award at MakeNTU. On the technical side, we pushed OpenCV to 10–15 fps real-time tracking and gained hands-on experience integrating embedded hardware under a tight deadline.