Symphoni
Year: 2023–2025Duration: 20 months
Symphoni is a Meta Quest mixed-reality rhythm game by techToy Studio that turns classical music into a synesthetic, spell-casting experience. Leveraging hand tracking and mixed reality passthrough, Symphoni lets player conduct music like a wizard casting spells. This title was featured at SXSW 2025, nominated for AWE Auggie Awards, and was the top-rated title on Meta Store on launch.
META QUEST TRAILER
What is Symphoni?
Symphoni invites players to conduct classical masterpieces as musical wizards in mixed reality. Hand tracking turns rhythmic gestures into powerful spells, as players transform their real-world surroundings into synesthetic realms of light and color. With 16 tracks to master and a unique ring interface, it invites players to raise their wands and experience the magic of classical music like never before.
The Creative Vision
The concept was sparked while experiencing a live performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As I watched the conductor's expressive control over the ensemble, I started to imagine an immersive virtual experience that could translate that sensation into something Kandinsky-like—sound and gesture rendered as color and motion.
Disney's Fantasiagave the project its second reference point: the idea that a conductor's gestures could double as spellcasting, with the music shaping the world in response.
From these references, I set two goals to anchor the creative and technical direction:
Experience Goal
Players will experience sensory pleasure when their kinesthetic, audio, and visual senses are in sync. Moreover, players will resonate with the music's emotional theme through physical expression and visual spectacles.
Player Goal
Players are challenged to orchestrate symphonies in perfect harmony by performing conducting-inspired gestures that match the tempo and expressions of the musical piece.
Managing the Production and Launch
I led production for a four-person team under tight budget and timeline constraints, which meant making sharp prioritization calls every week. I structured the roadmap so tooling, feature development, content creation, and art production progressed in parallel without bottlenecking each other — and protected the team's focus by absorbing scope discussions, vendor coordination, and platform requirements.
I managed the go-to-market strategy by acting as the primary liaison with Meta's platform managers. Additionally, I coordinated with external marketing agencies to direct the production of promotional trailers, social media campaigns, and targeted advertisements, ensuring a cohesive and impactful brand presence for launch.
Designing the Ring Interface
To capture the essence of orchestral conducting, we leveraged Meta Quest's hand tracking technology and designed a gesture-based input system that paired well with expressive, tempo-driven movements.
Designing around full-body movement meant players could experience the music visually, spatially, and haptically. Layering Fantasia-like spellcasting effects on top turned each gesture into a spell that spectacularly transforms the world around the player.
Crafting Expressive Environments
While player performance dictates when the virtual world appears, the music dictates whatthat world looks like. To ensure the visuals resonated with the gameplay, I drove the technical art direction to tie environment states and VFX directly to each song's emotional arc. This required directing the production of bespoke visual sequences for every track. By gating these visual crescendos behind player skill, the MR passthrough transition becomes both a performance reward and a powerful narrative tool, amplifying the emotional peaks of the music only when the player is truly in sync.
In House Tooling
Recognizing early production bottlenecks, I architected and developed a suite of custom Unity tools. By building an internal beatmapping editor, a visual timeline sequence, real-time preview windows, and modular VFX presets, I significantly streamlined our technical pipeline and empowered the team to iterate rapidly on beat maps and environment designs.
Visual Performance Optimization
To maintain a seamless frame rate despite our heavy use of demanding transparent and alpha-cutout shaders, I optimized our visual pipeline for the Quest's Android architecture. I delivered high-fidelity visuals within strict XR performance constraints by managing the GPU budget, controlling overdraw and particle counts, and implementing draw call batching, precise sorting orders, and custom lightweight shaders.
Building the Symphoni Composer
Following the success of our internal toolset, I spearheaded the UX design and technical translation of the beatmapping pipeline into a polished, public-facing feature: the Symphoni Composer. This involved converting complex developer tools into an intuitive, user-friendly interface for the player community.
The Impact
Recognitions
Nominated for Auggie Awards. Officially selected and featured at SXSW 2025 as a premier XR experience within the Austin Taxis showcase.
What Players Are Saying
T0mmyTune
What a fantastic game. You really get lost in the experience. … The game play only feels right with classical music (I'm not even a fan of classical music but I absolutely love it in this game). … Despite all my nitpicking above, it really is a fantastic game.
Specs
Tech Stack
Platform: Meta Quest, Pico
Engine: Unity Engine
Unity Stack: Universal Rendering Pipeline, Shader Graph, Open XR
Lanugage: C#
IDE: JetBrains Rider
XR SDK: Meta XR SDK, Pico XR SDK
XR Features: Hand Tracking, Passthrough, Scene Understanding
3D Modeling: Blender, Houdini
Analytics: Unity Analytics
Production: Notion, Jira, Perforce
Design: Figma
Trailer & Marketing Assets: Photoshop, After Effects
Credits
Ingram Mao
Ivan Pu
Seleny Xie
Carrie Chen
Ethan Soo
Markel Bodallo
Other Works