MR Pac-Man
You are Pac-Man, in mixed reality, on a real basketball court. You run with your feet. The ghosts get faster as you level up.
The Curiosity
The Meta Quest Pro arrived, the first headset built for mixed reality rather than for shutting the room out. I bought one, and this was the first thing I wanted to make with it.
VR isolates you: the room goes away. Phone AR keeps the room but puts a screen in your hand, and a screen at arm's length never stops reminding you that it is a screen. Mixed reality is the first version of the idea that gives you both halves at once — virtual things placed in the room you are actually standing in, full immersion, and nothing to hold. That is a genuinely new option, not a better version of an old one.
So: what happens if the maze is real size, and running from ghosts means actually running?
The Build
The maze is anchored to a real court through the headset's passthrough view, walls and pellets scaled so that the corridors are corridors. You are Pac-Man, and you move by moving. The ghosts speed up with every level, which is fair, because so do you.
The build was documented as it went, in five short devlogs on the devlog channel.
The Result
A playable demo, and enormous fun to play. The strong suspicion remains that the ghosts have the easier job.
What I Learned
All the work went into making the maze hold still on a real court. Then the thing that decided the project had nothing to do with any of it: running around a basketball court is exhausting. I had built something a lot of fun for five or ten minutes, and five or ten minutes is all anyone is going to give it.
A very cool experiment and very good exercise. Not a commercial product. Those are allowed to be different things.