TomeXR

Inspiration

Docking a massive vessel (over 50,000 tons) is one of the highest-stress operations in maritime navigation. With bridge superstructures located hundreds of feet back, captains face blind spots of up to 100 meters directly below the bow and along the quay wall. Today, they rely solely on verbal radio reports ("15 meters... 10 meters...").

We built BerthPilot XR to solve this visibility challenge: acting like a spatial "rear-view parking camera" for maritime bridge teams. It transforms blind verbal maneuvering into an intuitive, tactile tabletop holograph.

What it does

BerthPilot XR places a scaled 3D port harbor and vessel model directly on the captain's desk for rapid pre-berthing tactical rehearsals:

• Spatial Proximity & Clearance: Displays real-time millimeter/centimeter laser distances from hull contact points to quay fenders.
• Dynamic Physics Trajectories: Visualizes predicted drift corridors (accounting for side wind, tidal currents, and shallow-water cushion effects) instead of static 2D lines.
• Tug & Thrust Orchestration: Direct gesture assignment of virtual tugboat vectors and bow thruster power.
• Intuitive Safety Guardrails: Clear visual warnings (green approach corridor, yellow shear angle, red critical contact velocity threshold > 10 cm/s).

Hands-First & Seated Design

BerthPilot XR strictly follows the Hands-first and Airplane Seat Test guidelines:

• No Controllers Required: Entirely navigated with natural bare-hand gestures.
• Pinch & Drag: Pick up virtual tug lines or adjust mooring approach angles.
• Index Poke: Tap quay sensors or toggle bathymetric depth contour layers.
• Palm Glide / Time Scrub: Rotate wrist or drag a virtual timeline slider to simulate maneuvers 3 minutes into the future.
• Zero Room-Scale Dependency: All interactive elements remain within a comfortable 60 cm reach radius directly in front of the seated user.

How we built it

• WebXR & Immersive Web SDK (IWSDK): Lightweight, zero-install architecture running natively in the Meta Horizon browser.
• Spatial Rendering Engine: Procedural harbor geometry and vessel collision meshes optimized for steady standalone framerates.
• Maritime Physics Model: Vector calculation simulating displacement momentum, windage drag, and pivot points.

What's next

• Ingesting live NMEA and AIS sensor feeds via WebSockets for real-time in-situ mooring monitoring.
• Integration with autonomous agentic pilot copilots (COLREGs compliance and automated mooring checklist audits).

Built With

• meta