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A calm, glowing grotto in progress — the core Synephoria creation vibe.
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Voice-reactive bloom: speaking/singing generates swirling ambient forms in real time.
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Shape toolkit overview featuring the new Heart, Star, and Lit Sphere.
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Stretched Lit Spheres casting real light — lighting as a new creative medium.
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Multiple Lit Spheres sculpting mood and color across an unlit black sphere.
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Grouping and export workflow — select, group, transform, and export OBJ.
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Character sculpting example — built entirely from shapes inside Synephoria (Heart, Star, spheres, tori, and tints).
I wanted a space where anyone—artist or not—could load in and tap into their primal human creative center simply, naturally, and without head-scratching technical barriers. A space that felt as reflective as it did creative. Voice is the most human input we have, so I built in a voice-reactive audio visualizer that spawns swirling spherical forms to add more color and immersion to the environment. The goal is not productivity. It’s presence: a place to sculpt color, light, and sound the way people doodle in a notebook, but inside a relaxing VR space.
Synephoria blends synesthesia and euphoria, and the experience aims to live up to the name.
How I built it
Synephoria is a solo-dev project built in Unity for Meta Quest. The core loop combines:
- Voice-reactive growth (mic input processed on-device),
- 3D painting tools (lines + geometric shapes), and
- Comfort-first VR/MR navigation designed to feel intuitive even for first-time users.
I iterated in tight cycles: prototype → test in headset → refine UX. The app saves creations locally, keeping everything offline and lightweight. The soundtrack is fully original and designed to support flow states; the same philosophy applies to the visuals: minimal UI, maximal “feel.”
Significant updates during the competition period
During the Start Developer Competition window, I shipped multiple major creative-tool expansions:
1. Object Grouping + OBJ/MTL Export (new workflows for builders):
Lasso + Grouping tools: Users can volume-select shapes/strokes via the wrist menu using Select Group / Group Selected / Ungroup Selected.
Grouped manipulation: Grab any group with right grip to move/rotate it; use the right thumbstick to scale the entire group uniformly.
OBJ/MTL Export for groups:** Select a group → tap Export Selected as OBJ → receive a confirmation toast. Users can import their creations directly into their choice of 3D software to fine tune or use as assets in their own projects.
2. New shapes: Heart, Star, and Lit Sphere: These expand the expressive toolkit for both character creation and abstract art.
3. Lighting as a new medium (Lit Spheres): Lit Spheres now cast real point lights into the scene. Users can paint with illumination, shifting the mood of their grotto instantly. This meaningfully broadens the range of creative results possible in Synephoria.
Challenges & learnings
Lighting: The biggest challenge was adding dynamic lighting without breaking Synephoria’s unlit aesthetic or performance targets on mobile XR hardware. I learned to stay ruthless about scope, test constantly on device, and treat comfort/clarity as features rather than polish.
Group Load Bug: After implementing groups, I found that groups built up in multiple passes (group body → add more shapes → “Group Selected” again) wouldn’t load correctly. Later-added members were effectively bound to stale/nested group roots, so on load they snapped back to their original positions and the group “exploded.” The fix was to treat each live GroupRoot and its members list as the single source of truth: I now serialize one world-space transform per group plus per-member local position, rotation, and scale, then rebuild groups from that clean data on load.
UI and Custom Meshes: Building clean UI and custom “pull-from-your-hands” mesh tools required many late iterations to get the feel exactly right, reinforcing how much small UX details matter in immersive creation.
What’s next
Next priorities are implementing paint tools to the MR environment and continuing to expand the shape and color toolkit. The main goal stays the same: calm creation, fast flow, and zero friction. Note: Lighting via Lit Spheres shipped in the latest build; see the gallery stills for this new medium in action.
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