The Dissolve

Quest 3 mixed reality experience that transforms your physical space into a meditative psychedelic journey. Using passthrough and spatial audio, reality gently dissolves expanding consciousness.

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Inspiration

The Dissolve was born from a simple question: What if we could use mixed reality not to escape our environment, but to transform it?

Psychedelic-assisted therapy is revolutionizing mental health treatment, showing remarkable results for anxiety, depression, and PTSD. But access remains limited. We wanted to create an accessible gateway to altered states of consciousness—one that uses the Quest 3's stunning color passthrough to blur the boundary between the real and the imagined.

Your living room becomes the canvas. Reality itself becomes the medium.

What it does

The Dissolve is a mixed reality meditation experience for Quest 3 that:

  • Transforms your physical space using color passthrough as the foundation
  • Procedurally generates psychedelic visuals that react to spatial anchors in your room
  • Synchronizes breathing exercises with visual intensity—inhale to intensify, exhale to ground
  • Uses spatial audio to create an immersive soundscape that responds to head movement
  • Gradually "dissolves" reality through progressive visual effects: breathing walls, color shifts, geometric overlays, and particle systems

The experience guides users through a 10-minute journey from grounded awareness to peak visual transformation, then gently returns them to baseline—all while never fully obscuring the safety of their real environment.

How we built it

Tech Stack:

  • Unity 6000.3 with Universal Render Pipeline (URP)
  • Meta XR SDK & Meta XR Audio SDK
  • Quest 3 color passthrough API
  • Custom shaders for reality-bending effects
  • Spatial anchors for environment-aware visuals

Architecture: We built a modular effect system where each "dissolver" component can be layered:

  • PassthroughDissolver - manipulates the camera feed
  • GeometrySpawner - procedural sacred geometry generation
  • BreathingController - biofeedback-driven intensity
  • AudioReactiveManager - ties visuals to spatial audio

The 12-Hour Sprint: This project was built in an intense hackathon session, racing against Unity build errors, disk space crises (we hit 20MB free mid-build!), and Android SDK configuration battles. The constraint forced creative problem-solving and ruthless prioritization.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Disk Space Crisis - Mid-build, we discovered only 20MB free on the C: drive. Emergency cleanup freed 12.8GB just in time.

  2. Meta XR SDK Corruption - A Windows path accidentally got pasted into C# source code in the Meta SDK package cache, causing cryptic compiler errors. Required manual surgery on OVRConfig.cs.

  3. Android SDK Detection - Unity 6's new module system complicated SDK path detection. Environment variables weren't set, and Unity's bundled tools weren't installed. Required manual configuration of external SDK paths.

  4. Passthrough + Effects Balance - Finding the right opacity and blend modes so effects enhance rather than obscure the real environment took extensive iteration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a complete MR experience concept in under 12 hours
  • Solved complex Unity/Meta SDK integration issues under pressure
  • Created a wellness-focused application of cutting-edge MR technology
  • Designed an experience that's both visually striking and therapeutically grounded

What we learned

  • Quest 3's passthrough API is incredibly powerful for reality-augmentation experiences
  • Unity 6 + Meta XR SDK requires careful environment configuration
  • The best MR experiences don't replace reality—they transform your relationship with it
  • Hackathon constraints breed innovation (and creative debugging)

What's next for The Dissolve

  • Biometric Integration - Heart rate variability to automatically adjust intensity
  • Guided Sessions - Voiced meditation journeys with narrative arcs
  • Social Mode - Shared dissolution experiences with friends
  • Therapeutic Validation - Partner with researchers to study anxiety-reduction effects
  • Hand Tracking Interactions - Gesture-based controls for deeper immersion

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