A Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition Project
Worldview XR is an immersive, place-based mixed-reality experience for Meta Quest 3 that visualizes environments, history, and climate scenarios over time.
Interacting with a custom 3D-printed tripod mount for the headset, users turn tactile knobs to reveal past, present, and future overlaid onto the real world using passthrough.
This project is an early prototype developed for the Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition 2025, with this particular experience exploring the formation and ecological history of Sebago Lake, a popular tourist destination in Maine. Creating a window into the past, we illustrate how the landscape may have appeared when the mile-high Laurentide Ice Sheet towered overhead, when mammoths and mastodons roamed the region, and when the Wabenaki people traveled these waters in birch bark canoes.
Worldview XR is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit creating immersive outdoor XR installations that bring local history and ecology to life. We hope this competition entry helps drive the development of permanent, solar-powered public experiences that uniquely apply the Quest 3’s XR features.
- A narrated journey through the geological and ecological history of Sebago Lake
- Mixed Reality passthrough visualization
- Timeline UI for switching between environment states
- Arduino Bluetooth connection for tacticle interactivity
- RenderTexture fade transitions (no mesh overlap artifacts)
- Smooth forward/backward scrubbing
- Built for Quest 3 + Unity 6 + Meta XR SDK
For our prototype, we've created a custom 3D-printed viewing station mount that clips to the front of the Quest 3, allowing limited rotation from the intended viewpoint. Rotary encoder knobs are attached to the headstrap adapters and wired to an Arduino with an HC-05 Bluetooth module, which connects to the Quest automatically when the app is launched. The right knob traverses the timeline, while the left knob changes the opacity of the visualization.
For those pulling down the project, the Quest 3 controller joysticks can be used in place of the knobs. Up-down on the left joystick is mapped to opacity knob input and left-right on the right joystick is mapped to the timeline knob input.
Traditional mesh opacity fades cause severe overlapping transparency issues, especially with dense geometry or multiple layers.
This project avoids that by:
- Rendering the fullscreen view into a fadeable RenderTexture
- Keeping all 3D models opaque and unmodified
- Fading out the RenderTexture, swapping the active Era, and fading it back in
Assets/
Scenes/ ← Contains LivingLandscapeMain.scene (main scene)
Scripts/ ← All custom scripts
ScriptableObjects/ ← Era transition scriptable object definitions
Timelines/ ← Era transitions and signal emmitters
Prefabs/ ← Core UI elements
- Unity 6 (LTS)
- Meta XR SDK
- Quest 3
- URP
- Clone this repository
- Open the project in Unity
- Enable XR Plugin Management → Meta Quest
- Build → Android → deploy to Quest
- Launch and use the timeline to explore different visual states
- Put on the headset
- Launch the application
- Point at or grab the timeline slider
- Scrub through time to reveal different states
Because the physical rotary knobs are part of the real-world prototype, this build maps them to the Quest controllers:
- Left joystick up/down – Adjust opacity of overlays
- Right joystick left/right – Fade between eras (time travel)
This prototype demonstrates:
- A novel timeline-based XR visualization workflow
- Educational potential for climate, history, and environmental storytelling
- Techniques for tactile interaction with custom Quest peripherals
- A foundation for Worldview XR’s real-world outdoor viewer installations
Permanent weather-proof and solar-powered enclosure installation mockup rendered in Blender.
Rough schematic of manufactured viewer.
- Development of a weather-proof and solar-powered enclosure that can be permanently installed in outdoor locations. We have planned an initial phase of development with collaborators at the University of Maine Advanced Manufacturing Center. This will begin once we have secured enough funding
- Add gaze + hand-tracking input modes
- Add geospatial anchoring for outdoor viewer installations
- Expand timeline states (more weather, climate, and historical layers)
- Spatialized audio tied to each environment state
- Multi-scene asynchronous loading for large environments
The following audio assets were used under their respective Creative Commons licenses:
Wind Houling 1 — by Bosk1 https://freesound.org/people/Bosk1/sounds/144083/
Melodrone multisample 15 - Ice Drone - C4.flac — by Jovica https://freesound.org/people/Jovica/sounds/51571/
poly ice slow.wav — by skinnytecboy https://freesound.org/people/skinnytecboy/sounds/174388/
Water Flowing Through Distant Rapids 2 — by Yoyodaman234 https://freesound.org/people/Yoyodaman234/sounds/349070/
The following 3D models were used under their respective Creative Commons licenses from Sketchfab:
Rowboat - Handcrafted Wooden Canoe https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/rowboat-handcrafted-wooden-canoe-c0103212d0a7479d85a6fd430ba85ba8
Low poly Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) — Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/low-poly-columbian-mammoth-mammuthus-columbi-e47d442b22d64fbd9a3b7a539fc47987
Low poly American mastodon (Mammut americanum) — Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/low-poly-american-mastodon-mammut-americanum-ce335fa19cb141ae8467bb8d4320f56b
All other third-party assets used were properly licensed through Adobe Stock and the Unity Asset Store.
This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
You may:
- Share, copy, and redistribute the material
- Adapt, remix, and build upon it
Under the following terms:
- Attribution: Credit must be given to Worldview XR
- NonCommercial: No commercial use is permitted
- No additional restrictions: No DRM or added legal terms
Full license text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Worldview XR 501(c)(3) nonprofit building immersive environmental & historical XR experiences
Ian Donnelly - Founder
Website: https://worldviewxr.org/