Custom Home Mapper lets you map your house and play VR games in it!

Hello Ryan, can you introduce yourself to my readers?

My name is Ryan and I’m a creative person who became interested in VR back in 2015. I have made things in Unity ever since, now with 4 published titles: Custom Home Mapper (on Sidequest and Itch), as well as Space pilot Alliance, Pocket Racer, and RamCastle on App Lab

You have become well-known in the VR communities for your Custom Home Mapper solution for Quest. Can you describe it for the people that still don’t know it?

The mapper started as a Reddit post nearly two years ago. I asked people “imagine that instead of drawing a rectangle on the floor… you marked all the walls in your home and placed large cubes over all your couches and tables, effectively turning your whole house into one large multi-roomscale playspace. What kind of games/experiences would you like to play?”

A couple of months later I released a rough prototype/proof of concept with a handful of minigames, including a “build your own virtual apartment” mode with 100 prefabs of ‘house stuff’ that people could drag/drop into their environment. It’s been a busy year and half since that rocky launch (30% of new users were not even able to get through setup, tracking errors galore as they blindly stumbled around in their bathrooms and kitchens…) and yet people kept finding this project and supporting the work, and I kept releasing weekly updates.

The collection has grown into a dozen different apps and games with full AR/Passthrough integration (yay setup is easy now, and each game has an optional AR mode with different types of implementation) and multiplayer (a guest can appear as an avatar inside your own home, or you can visit other homes, play the different games in Co-op or PvP modes.. there’s even an android flatscreen app). It is an overwhelming amount of content to be honest for a solo hobby dev like me to be dealing with, but I really enjoy the process. 

How does it internally work? What are its features? Can you give us some tech details?

Ok. Mapper relies on Quest’s ability to (1) disable the Guardian via dev mode (I’ve seen 1600 square foot apartments all mapped out, the program works best in at least two connected rooms but there’s no real limit), and (2) maintain tracking through multiple areas/doorways/etc. It’s only the recent SDK updates that have really opened up this potential, a year ago the Quest had many problems with learning/adapting to new environments. Big up to the Meta team because my old Quest 1 is now a crazy capable AR device and it sure wasn’t when I bought it. Unity is the game engine, Photon handles the networking and Dissonance is amazing for VOIP. I use Playmaker for all my scripting and think it’s just the best Unity plugin ever. 

In terms of the procedural systems: a user sets up the locations of the walls (Steam VR style, by clicking corners) and places cubes to mark out other objects, and this very simplified geometry is used to generate the different scenes for the games. The most basic usage is in my “Places” game cartridge, basically a set of a dozen scenes like “Snowy forest” or “Underwater Sealab” where your home just transforms into a new environment, walls being replaced by windows or balconies that overlook different scenery and you can comfortably move from room to room. I’ve had to set up a few subsystems for “Guardians”, basically a grid that pops up to say “hey that’s not a real window/don’t stick your hand through your wall” but everything else just works naturally by replacing stuff in your house with other, similarly-sized virtual stuff.

There’s a bit of procedural logic sometimes in a scene that might say “ok if this boundary cube is 2 meters wide, it’s probably a table or couch and not a chair or lamp” but beyond that, it’s pretty basic. Conceptually I would say it’s interesting to design gameplay when you have no idea what the layout might look like.  There are several different spawning systems, raycasts that bounce around and look for open zones that could be used to place golf holes or whatever, but I try to keep each game really flexible so it can still function within a single room, a big empty house, or a big roller-rink or whatever. That’s really the neatest technical challenge and seems unique to this house-scale mapping scenario.

What are in your opinion the most intriguing applications that have been made by you and the other devs using it?

I think there’s a bit of confusion here, there is another ‘map your house’ package that a dev has open-sourced, and I’ve seen a few experiences like “VR animal escape” or “Mixed reality floor is lava”, “Zombies in your home”, etc that all lean on that particular package. I can’t say much because I haven’t tried them.
I wrote my own wall and cube setup in September 2020 and it’s been slowly refined since, but there are no other developers working with my code. The setup looks like this now. Once a house is mapped, I had to answer the question “why should a player have to move from room to room?” so I made all the different games. Originally everything was “full VR”, and I’ve recently been showing off different AR/MR implementations like AR minigolf, AR “my home is a spaceship“, the AR superhot clone, the mech RTS game… People maybe don’t understand that they all come from the same collection… My “I am highly explosive” game is really interesting too!

Other USERS with this software, well, I’ve seen wonderful and amazing things and met some really, really cool people. Two weeks ago, I stumbled into an apartment where two roommates in Sweden were working on their virtual home. They had it set up in “shared space/co-location/two Quests in one house/whatever that’s called” via multiplayer… we all laughed as they took me into their bathroom and showed me where they had set up a virtual toilet. Last week, I met an older man in Greece who first appeared in my apartment (I was hosting while watching television on the new video player feature): he had just purchased CHM (Custom Home Mapper) and had only spent 20min doing a basic setup, so I was able to switch over to his house and spend time teaching him to use the build tools (I realized it’s quite unintuitive, made lots of notes) and like, for me, that’s just already way beyond what I ever thought this program would be capable of. There are people out there, they have their entire home setup in VR and sometimes they just open the front door, a doorbell rings and you can walk into their house and say hi. It’s awesome and I just wanna make it better so I can do that more often.
I mapped my parents’ home recently and am astonished that tracking works flawlessly over two floors, so I’ll probably throw some kind of house party soon and invite all the users in the CHM discord.

How can developers implement it into their applications?

Well, they can’t. It’d be cool if they could (I understand GitHub now, so maybe?) but the Meta team is releasing stuff that will be more straightforward to use I think. I kinda need to rely on my own setup because all the games and multiplayer integration rely on the foundation. That being said I’m open to working with other devs, it’s just that I’ve just never been approached.

You mentioned Meta. I’ve also seen that it plans to add something similar to the official Quest SDK. What’s your opinion about their teased scene mapping utility?

Took a long time to wrap my head around at first because it seems so similar to my setup, but then I realized I’m not doing anything particularly inventive, this is absolutely the most logical way to solve the problem of mapping a room right now and so yes, of course, they do it the same way. I’m glad there are teams of professional dudes doing stuff behind closed doors and trying to solve the same problems and ultimately, I’m excited to see what comes out of all. This stuff is rad. More, please. 

Regarding implementation, I would like to keep my options open for other mobile AR headsets that might show up on the market, so it’s worth it for me to keep developing my own mapping solution instead of transitioning completely to use their SDK. I still can’t really put this on App Lab, because the Guardian size limit/drawing multiple guardians just doesn’t work well. It needs to find a home where I can at least market the product to more than the 20%-30% of the active userbase that has dev mode enabled, can disable Guardian, and is willing to sideload unknown sources content. 

I also suspect the Meta room mapping won’t exactly allow for 1600 square foot setups, but we will see. Guardian off/replace everything with my own setup still gives me the most options. I’ll probably write some kind of bridge that allows me to load an “official” setup and translate it to my own format, but I still have no idea what that information will look like. And the new stuff about spatial anchors, while useful, is way over my head technically in terms of coding and implementation [well, actually, I’ve made a great tutorial on spatial anchors on my blog, if you are interested! :P].

What is Custom Home Mapper’s price?

$7.99 on Sidequest and Itch.

I know you worked in contemporary circus for 20 years! Wow, that’s fascinating. How’s the Circus life?

Yes. I’ve been making shows for theaters and presenting/traveling as a solo artist for most of my life. I was based in London for 4 years and spent two in Paris and two in Los Angeles. Canada (my home country) isn’t exactly geographically a great place to be a traveling artist (normally can’t work in the USA, also can’t just fly to Toronto from Vancouver and come back later the same day…Canada is too big) so much of my work was in Europe where I had a working visa and maintain a reputation within the contemporary circus community as an innovative performer. 

Are you trying to pursue some projects mixing circus and VR?

Yes. I’ve been working with another company in a mocap studio on a production since 2017. Recently we received funding through both the Canada Council as well as Epic games. I’m strictly a performer in this role, this project is a live performance/realtime mocap and projection piece, a hour-and-half 3-acts theater show kinda thing with me and two other artists.
I also have a collection of cabaret shows I’ve been working on which I intend to release after the mapper is under control, sort of VR circus experiences in a big old building similar to the “Magic Castle” in Los Angeles. Admittedly, gaming isn’t exactly my passion… I’m still learning as a dev and I feel that my current work is really a stepping stone for me to learn how to use the creation tools and ultimately realize a bigger project.

Do you think it will be possible in the future to bring a full circus to XR?

Yes, that’s the plan. 

If you could teach a lesson to the other VR developers that are reading this interview, what would it be?

So I wrote a big response here at first from a performer point of view but it was lame. Truthfully I don’t think I know enough about dev yet to really comment. Perhaps it’s imposter syndrome, or maybe because I have such a limited understanding of what ‘real’ developers do. I think most of us are here because we want to create inside a new space where the rules haven’t been written yet. Take risks, work hard and be different, that’s been a recipe that worked for me. Find the niche you enjoy and then be generous and focus your time on exploring and sharing your ideas. Find the people who love your work, and then feed them what they want. 

What are your future plans?

Getting out of this “I have no idea what I’m doing” phase and then maybe moving into a professional development role somewhere that still gives me the flexibility to perform. It would be nice to not have to rely on performance income as my full-time gig. 

Anything else to add to this interview?

I very much appreciate the work you do and your tutorial on editing the android manifest was the key to finally getting Space pilot Alliance on App Lab. Thank you! 

[You’re welcome, I’m always glad to help amazing creators like you!]