May 8, 2025

Introducing North Star: A Visual Showcase for Meta Horizon Developers

By: Jason Meisel

We are thrilled to announce the full launch of North Star, a cutting-edge visual showcase for Meta Quest that demonstrates the stunning visual quality achievable in mixed reality. North Star is available in the Meta Horizon Store and as an open source project that you can download to inspire your own experiences and better understand new mechanics, gameplay, interactions, optimizations and more.

This immersive experience is set in a fantastical world inspired by the age of sail and exploration, where you become the new deckhand aboard the Polaris, a vessel on a daring quest to uncover a mythical and mysterious sunken treasure at Ocean Deep.

Designed to help you unlock the possibilities of mixed reality gaming, North Star enables you to explore a breathtaking world using dynamic hand gestures and body tracking. Along your journey you can interact with your environment and perform the duties of a deckhand; hoist the sails, brave a savage storm and face an unknown danger that lurks beneath the depths. Keep reading below to learn more about the showcase and the development techniques that brought it to life.

A Treasure Trove of Features and Techniques

North Star is more than just a showcase—it's a treasure trove of features and techniques that can be applied to your own projects. From its highly customizable ocean system to its realistic rope interactions, every aspect of North Star has been designed to push the boundaries of what's possible in mixed reality.

Optimized Ocean System: Learn how to create a visually stunning and performant ocean system that enhances the overall gaming experience.

Time of Day System: Explore how to create a dynamic lighting system that adds depth and realism to your game world.

Narrative and NPCs: Engage in an exciting adventure inspired by the age of exploration with fully animated and voiced NPCs.

Hand Tracking Gameplay: Get inspired by North Star's unique interactions that enhance player engagement.

Realistic Rope Interactions: Discover how to implement realistic rope interactions that add a new level of immersion to your game.

Comfort Settings and Accessibility: Understand the importance of comfort settings and accessibility features in creating an inclusive gaming experience.

PSO Caching: Learn how to build Vulkan’s pipeline state object cache ahead of time to prevent framerate drops when loading new scenes in-game.

North Star demonstrates techniques to create more immersive interactions with items like ropes.

Open-Source Project

Don’t just play North Star—see how it works by checking out the open-source project designed for developers who are eager to get the most out of Meta Quest hardware. Each feature has been built to be accessible and scalable, so you can take and build upon it in your own projects.

In addition to the core project, North Star includes several Unity packages that can be easily imported into your own projects. These packages are designed to help you create more immersive and engaging games, and include:

Rope System: A rope simulation system that uses burst-job based verlet rope with an anchoring system for interactions.

Viewport Renderer: A package that provides functionality to efficiently render a stencilled view of the game world, enabling features like the spyglass.

Narrative System: A custom, lightweight framework that allows designers to script game events efficiently. While primarily used in a linear structure, it also supports branching narratives and multiple task options.

Environment System: An environment renderer supporting clouds, weather systems, time of day and a dynamically simulated ocean.

These Unity packages are designed to be easy to use and integrate into your existing projects. By using these packages, you can save time and focus more of your efforts on creating a more engaging and immersive game experience for your audience.

Optimizations and Graphics Techniques

We're also excited to share the optimizations and techniques that helped us achieve a native 72 Hz framerate and 90 Hz with Application Space Warp (ASW). Through a combination of careful measurement and analysis using tools like OVR Metrics Tool, RenderDoc Meta Fork and Unity Profiler, we identified key areas for improvement.

We implemented various solutions to address low framerate causes, such as preloading assets, avoiding expensive calls and optimizing shader compilation. Additionally, we utilized Unity Burst Jobs to improve CPU performance, reduced quad overdraw and made modifications to the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) to further enhance rendering efficiency.

There are two more systems we developed to optimize performance: the Visibility Set System, which allows designers to dynamically manage object visibility and level of detail, and Shadow Importance Volumes, which enables designers to specify which surfaces require shadowmap coverage. These systems worked together to reduce unnecessary calculations, focus resources on critical areas and maintain high-quality visuals throughout the experience.

All of the graphical effects featured in the project are also available to explore. The Weather Effects include procedural rain and wind effects that are optimized for performance and realism. The Environment System serves as the core of our Time of Day functionality, managing seamless transitions between environment profiles to control lighting, fog and skybox settings.

Our Ocean System simulates realistic water behavior with features like foam and subsurface scattering (both above and below the water), while our custom Hair, Cloth and Skin shaders use specialized techniques for lifelike rendering. These systems collectively enable smooth, real-time environmental shifts and have comprehensive documentation to help you integrate them. Explore the repository to bring these immersive features to your own experiences.

North Star’s Ocean System simulates realistic water behavior and weather effects to create a more authentic seafaring experience.

By sharing our approach and learnings, we hope to empower you to optimize your experiences and push the boundaries of what's possible in mixed reality.

Get Ready to Set Sail

If you’re ready to hit the open ocean, enhance your game with cutting-edge visuals and optimize your immersive gameplay, download North Star for free on the Meta Horizon Store and explore the GitHub project today. Freshly refactored, the open source project features detailed documentation to help you understand and implement all major features and graphics optimizations.

Be among the first to hear about new features and open source projects like North Star by following us on X and Facebook, visiting the latest release notes and subscribing to our monthly newsletter in your Developer Dashboard settings.

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