Unreal Engine 5.4 · Meta Quest 3 · Deployed to Hardware
A standalone VR application built for Meta Quest 3, designed around emotional regulation and personalised sensory engagement. Users explore four hand-crafted environments, each built around a distinct sensory experience, with real-time interactive controls throughout. The focus was user agency - no instruction overlays, no UI prompts. Just natural discovery.
 
The Environments
The Cave:  A dimly lit hub space with pulsing ambient light and spatial audio. The starting point and central navigation space for the experience.
The Rain Room: Rainfall intensity is controlled in real time by the user raising or lowering their hand. No UI, no buttons, just gesture.
The Orb Room: Touch a floating orb and it drifts away, emits a particle pulse, and triggers a colour chain reaction that propagates across every object it collides with: including the environment itself.
The Jungle Playground : Interactive plants each toggle an individual spatial audio layer. Users compose their own soundscape as they explore.
 
Technical Challenges and Solutions
Performance on standalone hardware The most significant challenge was achieving acceptable frame rates on Meta Quest 3 standalone hardware. Development was conducted via PCVR cable on a low-specification machine, which masked performance issues that only surfaced during standalone deployment.
Lumen: Unreal Engine's real-time global illumination system was central to the visual quality of several environments, particularly The Cave and The Rain Room. Disabling it was not an option without fundamentally compromising the experience. This meant performance had to be recovered elsewhere.
The approach taken was systematic asset optimisation: reducing polygon counts across all environment meshes, lowering texture resolutions where perceptually acceptable, and auditing the scene for unnecessary draw calls. Each change was tested iteratively on hardware until stable frame rates were achieved. Lumen remaining active throughout meant the optimisation bar was higher than it would otherwise have been, but the final build runs without frame rate issues on device.
Testing approach Given the target audience individuals with neurodivergent conditions or mental health support needs standard user testing with external participants was not appropriate. All testing, observation, and iterative adjustment was conducted by myself. This required developing a strong internal feedback loop: identifying friction points, assessing interaction clarity, and adjusting systems based on reasoned judgement rather than observed behaviour. The gesture based controls in particular went through multiple tuning iterations to feel natural without instruction.
 
Key Features

• Gesture-based rainfall control - hand height maps directly to rainfall intensity

• Chain reaction colour propagation system across dynamic objects and environment

• Per-plant spatial audio toggle system for user-composed soundscapes

• Niagara particle systems for orb pulse and environmental effects

• Developed via PCVR cable, optimised and deployed to Meta Quest 3 standalone

• Lumen retained throughout despite performance constraints via deep asset optimisation

 
Status
4 environments complete and deployed to hardware. Architecture is modular and ready for expansion.

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UE5.4 Blueprints Meta Quest 3 Niagara Spatial Audio Gesture Interaction GitHub