Arkio, Eleven Table Tennis, Cubism

Mixed reality (MR) is quickly transforming the immersive landscape with new capabilities developers can use to deepen feelings of presence, enable more realistic interactions between virtual and physical objects, and design more engaging experiences. Across app genres, developers behind some of the top games and apps on Meta Horizon have been quick to implement capabilities like Passthrough, Boundary API, and Spatial Anchors, to give audiences a new way to enjoy their favorite experiences.

Thomas Van Bouwel’s Cubism was one such early adopter. Launched in 2020, Cubism has become a fan-favorite thanks to its simple yet deceivingly captivating gameplay, with a new MR mode that lets players solve an array of puzzles in the comfort of their physical environment. For Fun Labs’ 2020 hit Eleven Table Tennis quickly followed suit, integrating Passthrough that both enhances feelings of presence between players and helps ensure the safety of its audience during casual and competitive matches. While MR has many applications for immersive gaming, it can also be a powerful tool in fueling collaboration and creativity. The team behind the 3D modeling app Arkio combined core MR capabilities like Passthrough and Spatial Anchors with more recent ones like Boundary API to help designers build rapidly in human and model scale environments with numerous collaborators.

With MR paving the way for blended environments that help people explore, connect, and play in new ways, these apps have experienced significant, positive impacts on engagement and retention while achieving growth with new audiences in the Meta Horizon Store.

To deliver functionality that would allow users to design using their physical space and objects, the developers of Arkio created a workflow to import room scan data from Meta Quest’s Space Setup and convert it to Arkio geometry. This enabled people to quickly map out their immediate surroundings and make edits with in-app tools.

Given the hands-on and malleable nature of Arkio, maintaining persistent alignment between physical and virtual objects was also a top priority. This functionality was achieved through Spatial Anchors, which allowed the team to save several anchor positions within a scene to help align designs in human-scale environments and switch back and forth between design options.

For these larger, human-scale environments, enabling designers to move freely throughout and around their designs can power a more efficient workflow. By leveraging Boundary API and customizing it to fit their app’s unique needs, Arkio’s developers were able to remove the guardian boundary and open the door for faster iteration and enhanced collaboration. To further advance collaboration-enhancing features, the team leaned on Shared Spatial Anchors to support colocation along with custom tools providing the ability to search through each colocated user and automatically align them. As an extra safety feature to prevent collisions between users and physical objects, Passthrough was also used to create a feature that dims the opacity of a model and provides a subdued view of the physical world.

All of these implementations required extensive debugging and sifting through large log files. Successfully expediting this process across multiple devices required building custom in-house diagnostic tools that allowed the team to listen to specific logs and log events while the app was live. These tools greatly reduced iteration time by enabling the team to observe the app events propagating between devices in real time and identify dysfunctional steps in a distributed environment.

To give players more confidence to make better use of their physical space and lean into the active aspects of table tennis, the team at For Fun Labs utilized Passthrough to provide players with a full view of their physical environment.

With MR giving people a better understanding of their positioning within physical space, players can lunge, swing and move side-to-side without accidentally bumping into furniture and feel more comfortable during their matches.

To reduce onboarding friction for new players and provide a fresh experience for Cubism fans, the Cubism team implemented a combination of Hand Tracking and Passthrough. These capabilities enabled players to experience the game in an entirely new way by intuitively using their hands to solve puzzles as they would in the physical world. With passthrough, players could feel more at home in their physical environment and stay connected to the people around them while working through the game's puzzles.

By leveraging extensive playtesting and sharing updates to its community, the team peaked interest and ensured the MR experience was seamless for new and existing players alike.