Planet Purifiers: A Collaborative Immersive Experience Proposing New Modifications to HOMER and Fishing Reel Interaction Techniques

TL;DR

This paper presents a collaborative VR game addressing trash pollution awareness and efficiency of 3D interactions for the 2025 3DUI Contest. It introduces FLOW-MATCH, a cone-based extension to HOMER that reduces the precision needed for long-distance object selection, and RAWR-XD, an asymmetric bi-manual enhancement to Fishing Reel that scales reeling speed via non-selecting wrist tilt. Implemented in Unity with OpenXR and Normcore networking, the system runs on Meta Quest devices and supports two players: pollutant collection and wildlife medicating. The work contributes concrete interaction-technique improvements and demonstrates a compelling, environmentally themed cooperative experience with potential impact on user engagement and 3D interaction design.

Abstract

This paper presents our solution to the 2025 3DUI Contest challenge. We aimed to develop a collaborative, immersive experience that raises awareness about trash pollution in natural landscapes while enhancing traditional interaction techniques in virtual environments. To achieve these objectives, we created an engaging multiplayer game where one user collects harmful pollutants while the other user provides medication to impacted wildlife using enhancements to traditional interaction techniques: HOMER and Fishing Reel. We enhanced HOMER to use a cone volume to reduce the precise aiming required by a selection raycast to provide a more efficient means to collect pollutants at large distances, coined as FLOW-MATCH. To improve the animal feed distribution to wildlife far away from the user with Fishing Reel, we created RAWR-XD, an asymmetric bi-manual technique to more conveniently adjust the reeling speed using the non-selecting wrist rotation of the user.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: A top-down view of the polluted environment.