Horizon Worlds Skydome, 2022
A custom skydome system for Meta's VR app Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest 2.

Tools: Unity, HLSL, C#
Prototyping, rendering, scripting, shading: Johan Ismael
Art direction: Patrick Jensen

As part of the Horizon Worlds Technical Art team, I collaborated with art director Patrick Jensen to give users the ability to customize the skydome in the 3D worlds they create in VR. The main constraint was performance and the limited capabilities of the Meta Quest 2 headset: given that Horizon Worlds was already CPU and GPU-bound, the new procedural skydome shader had to perform on par with the existing cubemap-based one.

The final shader enables users to specify 3 colors (top, horizon and bottom), as well as the fall-off curves for each color transition. They can also control fog color, density, and how the skydome impacts the scene lighting. In addition to shader development, I worked on the C# scripting layer to connect the new skydome system to the rendering / ligthing layer, as well as the React VR UI layer.

The feature was released in early January 2023 and was a big hit among users!