Photosynthespace

Landing Page
Carousel
Connection to Meta Quest 3
Voiceflow Demo Chat
MR Simulation

🫘 Inspiration

For many of us, our most impactful work happens in the most understated spaces. Libraries, study halls, our bedrooms. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but we wanted to see blooming plants bring life and energy to these spaces-- without the real life responsibility of plant parenting. Just like the the natural process this app was named after, we realized our MR garden can bring life and energy to our goals as well if it gives us a chance to document, visualize, and celebrate our accomplishments while feeling like a game!

🌱 What it does

Photosynthespace is a Mixed Reality (MR) gardening simulation that allows you to identify surfaces in a room and cultivate virtual plants on it as a tool for goal setting and progress tracking. Each plant sowed by you represents a goal or habit of your description. Then, you have the option to input your own steps or to have the plant generate a step-by-step plan. You can view these roadmaps as you select the plant and watering these plants is the equivalent of checking off a step on the list. Watch these lil guys grow as you water them more and more!

Next, if you encounter a problem with completing any steps of your 'plants' (synonymous with 'plans' in our app😼), you can talk to them directly via a voice-to-text conversation and have a tailored rubber ~~ducky~~ plant-y to navigate your issues with.

Finally, bring your headset anywhere and you can take care of your garden and your progress in any space! Meditate, cultivate, relax, and enjoy the cute visuals and music.

🥽 Why Mixed Reality?

We believe in retaining the essence of your space and simply reveal the progress that's often hidden. Hopefully, it fortifies the vital skill of appreciating your achievements no matter how big or small. At the end of the day, you grew them with care, as you do with a plant. Traditionally, XR is used to transport you to a new environment, but Photosynthespace will transform your environment into a representation of you and your efforts!

🪻 How we built it

Photosynthespace is built with Unity connected to a Meta Quest 3. Voiceflow interprets the user's requests and concerns to generate conversation responses and the steps to achieving a given goal. AWS

🌷 Challenges we ran into

Spatial mapping
Flowers spawning out of control
Integrating Voiceflow into Unity

🌻 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a proof-of-concept for an idea that we would personally use!
Persevering through the bugs and mental breakdowns

🪴 What we learned

XR dev at this scale is best with two of the SAME headset available. We only had one compatible.
Sometimes starting over from the beginning is a breath of fresh air that can allow us to make it to the end of the project, the second time around!

🌳 What's next for Photosynthespace

Procedural generation to create a unique every plant for every unique goal. Its growth processes will also look smoother
Create our own plant/sound/music assets in general
As XR devices become more accessible in hardware and software, our app will be even more intuitive -Sticking plants to walls and turn the spray bottle to a watering can!