Crafting World Piece
Building a Unity mixed reality app from scratch
It’s been a while since I’ve developed a personal project from end to end. For this next one, I’d like to try something different. As I build this project, I’ll share the progress (and the code!) here. It’s a way to organize my thoughts, document my discoveries, and give back to the online developer community.
So what are we building?
A couple of months ago I picked up a Quest 3 and have generally been impressed with the comfort and resolution compared to Quest 2. I’ve also made passthrough my default mode. I’m of the mind that mixed reality will be the real game-changer in the long run. With decent passthrough, the Quest 3 is also a good proxy for future Vision Pro development.
So I want to create a simple app that lives comfortably in passthrough mode on the Quest 3. There are two apps that I’m using as inspiration: Cubism and Puzzling Places.
Both of these apps provide simple, clean spatial experiences that play well in passthrough. Cubism has a delightfully elegant UI, while Puzzling Places makes satisfying use of space, sound, and up-close detail.
With these apps as inspiration, I’ve decided to create my own mixed reality puzzle. The working title (thanks to my husband) is World Piece. It’s a virtual 3D puzzle of the globe with all the countries as separate pieces. That’s right, we’re going to learn some geography on this journey!
The details of the app will unfold as we build it. For now, we should pick our development tools:
- Unity 2022 LTS
- Unity XR Interaction Toolkit
- Blender 3.6
That’s it for now, we’ll get started with creating the puzzle pieces in Blender next time!
