🐝 Hello!
Busy Buds is a mixed reality app designed to help you break out of procrastination and get things done!
It was created by myself, Amanda Parks (design and development) and Jane Wei (music and sound effects) for the 2024 Meta Quest Presence Platform Hackathon.
It is currently only for Quest 3.
🌹 Inspiration
I've been interested in mixed reality ever since I saw a holodeck in Star Trek back in the 90s. I truly believe that this technology has the potential to not only improve quality of life for many people, but to simply make boring things more fun.
I saw this hackathon as an opportunity to explore this potential myself and thought about what things in my life could be more enjoyable—it didn't take me long to settle on household chores!
🌼 What it does
There are countless applications out there for keeping track of to-dos, but when it comes down to actually doing the task, you're on our own.
That's where Busy Buds is different.
Busy Buds sets users up for success by naturally guiding them to focus only on what they can accomplish within the limited amount of time provided. The task markers (flower buds) must be physically placed on to-dos, grounding them in reality.
The music has also been specifically designed to help people get into the right headspace for their tasks. There’s a hype track for getting energised, a binaural beats track to increase focus and a chill track for when you want to relax.
Your friendly virtual buddy, Bee, has a big job too. There are a lot of flowers that need help blossoming but Bee can't do it without your company. By setting tasks for yourself, you're setting tasks for Bee too, and together you can achieve something magical!
🌷 How we built it
The project was created using Unity and FMOD. The Presence Platform capabilities I included were Passthrough, Spatial Anchors, Hand Tracking and the Interaction SDK.
🌸 Challenges we ran into
At the start of the hackathon I was so excited about spatial anchors that I didn't consider how much of my idea was contingent on a smoothly functioning world-space UI, and that I'd never made one before. Oh what a sweet summer child I was!
Another challenge was working remotely with the composer and not having a headset for her to test on. We set up spatialisation for the sound effects and I think it sounds okay but I'd trust Jane's ear more.
🌻 Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm very proud of my repositionable spatial anchors.
I've made basic VR experiences in the past but this was my first time doing mixed reality, using the Presence Platform SDK and, to be honest, really learning how to use a SDK properly. I got to a point where I couldn't make what I wanted with the Building Blocks so needed to figure out how to write a derived class (and what that even meant). Now I'm using them in my own scripts! I feel like my programming has really levelled up this hackathon.
I'm also very proud of the level of functionality and overall polish we were able to achieve. I actually used Busy Buds myself when hanging up the washing the other day.
🌺 What we learned
Both of us got to try some new things this hackathon. I had originally intended to use a pre-made texture for the bee but nothing was looking right so I opened up Photoshop and made my own, including a normal map and displacement map. To my surprise, it actually turned out okay and I hope to make Bee's little crocheted body even fuzzier in the future.
Jane created her first binaural beats track, appropriately named BEEnaural BEEt in the project files. It's a type of auditory illusion where different frequencies are played into each ear. Some people say they find it mood altering, we're not entirely sure, but it's definitely hypnotic.
🌞 What's next for Busy Buds
I've never published an app before but if there's interest in Busy Buds, I'll give it a go!
There is a whole list of additional features I would like to add, including the ability to save sets of buds to create routines (eg. get ready for work routine, quick living room tidy routine etc), hand pose interactions with the bee, and unlockable flower varieties with new music tracks and effects.
I also know I've barely scratched the surface of what's possible with Presence Platform so I'm keen to explore it more.
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