Jigsaw Night: A Masterclass in VR & Mixed Reality Design
▼ Summary
– Steve Lukas launched his mixed reality puzzle app *Jigsaw Night* on Meta’s storefront, developed over seven months (or eight years, depending on perspective).
– The app supports both co-located (same physical space) and co-presence (remote) interactions, a rare feature in XR, blending VR and AR seamlessly.
– *Jigsaw Night* utilizes advanced tools like spatial anchors and LIV camera integration, offering a shared reality experience typically limited to high-cost lab setups.
– Lukas’ work demonstrates best practices for mixed reality design on Meta’s Horizon OS, addressing industry challenges like platform lock-in and underutilized features.
– The app’s intuitive interaction design (e.g., pinch/grasp gestures, controller support) and real-world testing highlight its potential to redefine digital collaboration in XR.
The sun deck of the Queen Mary provided the perfect backdrop for a conversation about virtual reality’s untapped potential. Standing beside Steve Lukas on the launch day of his app Jigsaw Night, the ocean breeze carried away the midday heat as we discussed his seven-month development sprint, or eight-year journey, depending on perspective. His 15-year-old son Christian had just pressed the button hours earlier at Augmented World Expo, releasing the app into Meta’s storefront.
Wearing Quest 3 headsets, we assembled a digital jigsaw puzzle, slotting the final piece with a satisfying click. Lukas apologized for the limitations of his launch code, but the moment felt transformative. When he carried the completed puzzle to the ship’s edge, hanging it midair as we gazed toward the Aquarium of the Pacific, the simplicity of the interaction belied its technical sophistication.
“Why did this take so long, and why does it feel so good?” I asked.
Lukas traced it back to his eight-year obsession with shared spaces. After experimenting with ARKit, HoloLens, and Vive, he became fixated on creating seamless mixed-reality interactions. “It’s like saying we won’t make cars until we eliminate stick shifts,” he mused. “You miss years of learning.” His approach defies industry trends, where many developers avoid early tools due to platform volatility.
Jigsaw Night isn’t just a puzzle game, it’s a blueprint for mixed reality’s future. The Unity project’s component list reads like a wishlist for immersive tech: world anchoring, puzzle generation, voice chat, and Meta’s Mixed Reality Utility Kit, among others. Few apps bridge the gap between local and remote collaboration so elegantly. Lukas distinguishes between co-location (shared physical space) and co-presence (remote connection), a nuance often lost in Silicon Valley’s buzzword-heavy discourse.
The app’s standout feature? The LIV virtual camera, which films only the virtual environment while passthrough AR grounds the user in reality. During testing, the camera captured my Meta avatar assembling puzzles in a sparse digital room, while my headset displayed the actual Queen Mary surroundings. The effect was seamless, a rarity even among Meta’s first-party apps.
What makes Jigsaw Night remarkable is its intuitive design. Hand tracking supports both pinch and grasp gestures, while controllers offer trigger and grip alternatives. During a session with CNET’s Scott Stein, we bumped hands reaching for the same puzzle piece, laughing at the tactile realism. Lukas’s work suggests a future where handing digital objects to others feels as natural as passing a coffee cup.
The industry often chases tomorrow’s tech, but Lukas proves the future is already here. As he later messaged me, “This isn’t about waiting for breakthroughs, it’s about refining what we have.” For now, Jigsaw Night stands as a masterclass in making shared reality tangible, one puzzle piece at a time.
(Source: Upload VR)
