This is an interaction design project I worked on top of the XR Interaction toolkit in Unity. The experience prototypes a VR news reader that can be selected based on locations.

Here’s a video of the final prototype

The interaction requires the controllers to work with and mainly uses the standard VR input for locomotion, grabbing and selection. Here is a quick overview of the process.

My first step was to make a sketch of how the interaction should look like.

Then I moved over to build a quick prototype in Shapes XR

Shapes XR provides a great way to understand the spatial properties of an interaction. Once the design is verified, I moved over to Unity to implement the interaction.

After a little bit of Art paint over, here’s the final look.

The final prototype is open source and click the button below for the source code.

To make my final prototype smooth, here are the following implementations I added.

• A custom component to move and rotate the earth smoothly.
• No lights in the whole scene, everything is baked and gimmicked.
• A custom script to convert Lat, Long values to project on the earth, so adding any news item can be done via a JSON.