[S11] - WildWood

Step into WildWood, a mixed reality jungle adventure! Kids can explore wildlife, interact with creatures, and hear fun facts– all while staying aware of their surroundings. Safe, fun, and educational!

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WildWood – where the jungle comes to life

"Wow, there’s an elephant here. Can it feel this?"

That was a comment from one of our 5-year-old children when he tried our game and touched the animal in mixed reality. It was amazing to see our kids get so excited about experiencing a jungle filled with animals right on the living room floor.

Everyone on our team has children, and when we brainstormed the concept, we strongly felt it would be fun to build a project for them where we could explore, play, and interact together. Through mixed reality, we wanted to create a safe and social experience for kids, where we could also use the room as part of the game.

Our biggest challenge was time. Since we all have children, we don’t have the same amount of time to dedicate. So, we set up various milestones with an MVP in different phases:

The foundation was to build the jungle with plants and animated animals. After that, our goals included having the animals walk around, letting players pick them up, interact with them, and, by tapping them, get fun facts through audio. We also planned to allow interaction with the environment, like setting up a ladder for monkeys to climb or leading elephants to water so they can bathe.

Working on our first mixed reality project in Unity has been an eye-opening and educational experience. Creating a mixed reality experience taught us the importance of spatial mapping. In traditional 2D or 3D games, you control the environment entirely, but in mixed reality, you're working with real-world spaces. We had to learn how to use Unity’s MR toolkit and Oculus SDK to map out rooms, recognize surfaces, and ensure the virtual elements interacted seamlessly with the physical environment. This adds a whole new dimension to designing for user experience.

So what’s next for WildWood? It would be really fun to keep developing the game and make it possible for more adults and children to try it out.

Built With

  • buildingblocks
  • c#
  • effectmesh
  • hand-tracking
  • handtracking
  • metapresenceplatform
  • poke-interaction
  • pokeinteraction
  • sceneunderstanding
  • unity
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