Inspiration
Ironically, this started with my neighbor's toddler trying to climb our fence, dangerously ... over and over. So, as a climber, I wanted to build him a better, and safer, solution - a fun at-home wall to climb! Also, as a fancy-pants furniture builder and 3D artist, I wanted it to be really, really fun and good looking. Alas ... I soon discovered the math for proper triangulated walls is really, really tough.
But wait! I'm also an XR developer! I decided to solve this with an app that was so simple anyone (eg, my neighbors, don't tell them) could use it for the design part, and that could generate complete instructions to build, no math required.
What it does
Intuitive 3D Design
"Climb Design" makes use of XR in ways people forget - building, not destroying! Humans are 3D creatures, we forget that because we work all day on 2D monitors (or paper and pencil), but XR changes this. In Climb Design, you simply "tap" around in the real world to build up your design. No complex tools or concepts, just like using infinitely-editable playdough.
IKEA-level Construction
Ok, sort of - you'll need some real tools, but that's about it. Climb Design exports a complete, piece-by-piece list of every triangle, and every support beam, with carefully thought out instructions. Using "graph points" instead of angles (much less prone to error), solving multi-bevel cut angles, and more, it makes an otherwise near-impossible task, merely very tedious. The result is worth it though!
How we built it
Many, many restarts and backtracks and tests! The key for me was truly intuitive, simple interaction, and a fool-proof instructions export. I'd love to share the GitHub commits ... branches up branches of "restarts" as I found better paths and methods.
Mainly though:
- Unity Engine
- Meta's core interaction SDK (Hands, PokeInteractors, Spatial Anchors, mainly)
- A last-minute purchase of an external GPU for live testing, when builds were clearly too slow and XR Sim wasn't enough
- Significant use of LLM (Claude Code) to solve the math. Wow that was a lot of math.
Challenges we ran into
Interaction: solutions I thought would definitely work ... did not. It's very difficult to predict XR interactions, at least these days - there are so few XR tools, it's a new "language" to build with Building a Tool: similar to the above, building a "Tool" is uniquely difficult (vs a game), as everything in the ecosystem (and tutorials, etc) is setup for games. So, much of the time was spent designing, testing, trashing, and rebuilding base-level solutions for tool-centric controls and serialization. I hope to share the result for others!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Honestly the resulting tool system. I probably spent too much time on this, but I'm excited to take it further and share soon. Games are great, but the world needs more XR tools, the benefits over 2D screens for 3D-space editing is just amazing. So, that's next if I get time/funding - cleaning it up and publishing a complete "tool makers" foundation for Quest. It covers so much ground for others - input management, customization, tool additions, snapping, editing, manipulation, save and load, etc.
What we learned
Most of all - forget careful design and just try ideas quickly and continuously. Never get too far into any interaction assumption, without trying it out. So much early work was just test and trash.
What's next for Climb Design
Build for real! I'll be moving to the woodshop for the next phase, building a real, complete wall to prove it out (already did a small test). Polish and release - Very excited to share this app out to the climbing community, many of whom are also DIY folks. **Publish "XR Tool Maker" - If possible, I'd love to get this foundation to others.
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