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First Encounters

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Your room is the planet. The puffians are already on their way. Time to pony up.

When Meta launched the Quest 3 – the most advanced standalone mixed reality headset on the market – it needed a launch title that proved the hardware to everyone who opened the box. UNIT9 built First Encounters. Pre-installed on every headset sold.

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"We built dozens of effects from scratch. The goal wasn't to make a good VR – it was to make something that felt like it was actually happening in your room."

– Mariusz Kucharczyk, Art Director, UNIT9

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EXECUTION

First Encounters drops players into a space-themed hunt – capture as many puffians as possible before time runs out, using your physical space as the arena.

The Quest 3's depth sensors extract a mesh of the user's – furniture, walls, the exact shape of the room. First Encounters uses that data to dissolve the boundary between physical and virtual, letting the game bleed into real space rather than sit on top of it.

UNIT9 designed every asset and effect around the hardware's constraints and capabilities — optimising for device performance while building interactive effects that respond to real-world conditions. The visual benchmark was console quality. The environment was someone's living room.

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RESULTS

Shipped on every Quest 3 sold — the most widely distributed mixed reality launch title to date.

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First Encounters reached vast audiences from day one, arriving pre-installed on every headset. The Verge called it "the single most fun MR experience I've had so far." The Gamer said it would make you believe in mixed reality.

It remains the benchmark for what the medium can do.