If you’re unfamiliar with Arkio’s design tools, now is the time to check it out on Quest 2.
The design app is available now in the Quest store starting with a free tier which has multiplayer, passthrough portals to the physical world, hand tracking, and the core modeling tools for shaping worlds. Starting at $8 per month, though, hobbyists looking to get started with spatial design get Unity integration that includes the ability to import and export directly from Quest to the world’s most popular game engine.
“Game devs can take their Unity scene, import it into Arkio, make changes, and then export everything back to Unity and everything will update on that end as well,” Arkio’s founder and CEO Hilmar Gunnarsson told UploadVR.
There are additional pricing tiers as well with features designed for professional architects and enterprises — the types of things we learned about when Arkio launched on Quest’s App Lab last year. But with those first two pricing tiers now available with the full launch, Arkio should offer creators a powerful new tool for designing spaces directly in VR. While ShapesXR seems tuned particularly for 3D storyboarding sessions and Meta’s Horizon Worlds is focused on creating worlds you might want to visit with friends, Arkio seems designed to appeal to a wide range of spatial designers.
I sat down with Gunnarsson in our virtual studio this week and he explained the features launching with Arkio. You can check out a 5-minute cut of our interview in the embedded video above where he goes into detail on Arkio and, in particular, explains how the passthrough features effectively break down the walls between virtual and physical worlds. In the video, he shows how one designer could layer shapes onto their physical environment for interior design purposes while a colleague designs a vast cityscape right outside the physical window.
You can download Arkio on Oculus Quest now.
