B09 CRAZY DUCKS

An immersive mixed-reality adventure with natural hand-tracking and procedural vegetation that transforms your space into a living world.

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What it does

Xplore is a team-built mixed-reality experience that transforms any physical room into a living, explorable biome. Using natural hand-tracking gestures, players can grow, shape, and interact with procedurally generated vegetation that blends seamlessly into their real environment. The experience feels intuitive, immersive, and playful — no controllers, no menus, just your hands and a world that reacts to them.

How we built it

Our team developed Xplore using Unity, the Meta Quest SDK, and a custom procedural vegetation system.
We divided responsibilities across:

  • Hand-tracking & interaction design
  • Procedural environment generation
  • MR passthrough integration
  • Art direction & low-poly assets
  • Performance optimization for standalone hardware

We relied heavily on Unity's XR features, Meta's hand-tracking API, spatial anchors, and shader tricks to make vegetation feel alive while remaining lightweight.

Challenges we ran into

Building Xplore as a team brought both fun and difficulty:

  • Making gestures feel fluid and reliable across users
  • Getting procedural generation to run fast enough on device
  • Aligning virtual plants with real-world geometry
  • Ensuring consistent hand-tracking in different lighting conditions
  • Syncing ideas, branches, and prototypes across the team during rapid iteration

Despite these challenges, collaboration pushed the project far beyond its initial scope.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of:

  • Creating a controller-free interaction system that feels magical
  • Designing vegetation that adapts to real-world surfaces
  • Achieving stable performance with a fully procedural system
  • Merging everyone’s strengths into a polished, cohesive experience
  • Seeing testers instinctively reach out and interact — and smile

What we learned

As a team, we learned how to:

  • Build intuitive MR interactions around natural human motion
  • Balance creativity with technical constraints
  • Iterate quickly on XR user experiences
  • Collaborate under time pressure while keeping the vision aligned
  • Push Unity and the Meta Quest hardware further than we thought we could

What's next for Xplore

Looking forward, the team aims to:

  • Add multi-user mixed-reality exploration
  • Introduce more biome types and dynamic weather
  • Expand gesture vocabulary using machine-learning gesture recognition
  • Enhance procedural systems with more variety and interactivity
  • Release a public demo and gather community-driven ideas

Xplore is just the beginning — our goal is to redefine how people interact with digital worlds layered onto their own.

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