Project: AN-Prez – Spatial Collaboration in Mixed Reality
Date: 2022
Subtitle: Because PowerPoint was never meant for 3D

How I made the MR Collaboration from ₹4L to ₹21K?

💥 The Chaos Before the Canvas

Let’s face it — remote collaboration was... fine.

Until it wasn’t.

Presentations were 2D.
Product demos lacked context.
Brainstorming meant sharing screens while juggling Notion, Zoom, and a prayer.

Mixed Reality should have been the answer. But MR tools were either:

• Built for solo exploration, not team flow

• Clunky or overengineered

• Or stuck behind ₹4L HoloLens price tags

We didn’t need more slides.
We needed a war room — spatial, persistent, alive.
Think: JARVIS, but for meetings.

🎯 The Mission

We had already built AN-Prez, a multiplayer Mixed Reality app for immersive collaboration — live avatars, sticky notes, 3D models, and slides — all in the same shared space.

But it was locked to Microsoft HoloLens.
Which meant it was basically locked to... nobody.

₹4,00,000 per headset isn’t how you scale team collaboration.

So I took on a challenge that, at the time, felt almost mythical:
Migrate AN-Prez from HoloLens to Oculus Quest. Solo.
No docs. No guides. Just code, grit, and way too many build errors.

🚧 The Reality of XR Porting

This wasn’t a one-line platform switch. It was an ecosystem jump.

AreaHoloLens (UWP)Oculus Quest (Android)OSWindowsAndroidInputGaze & air-tap (MRTK)Controllers (Oculus SDK)Build SystemUWP + Visual StudioGradle + Android StudioDocsSparse but existsJust vibes and GitHub issues

I had to rethink interactions from the ground up — not just port code.
Gaze-based UX? Doesn’t work with controllers.
Air-taps? Replaced with precise joystick + hand tracking.
Even slide transitions needed reanimation.

🛠️ Rebuilding AN-Prez: Piece by Piece

AN-Prez wasn’t just "PowerPoint in VR" — it was a multiplayer sandbox where teams could ideate, present, and explore ideas together, in real-time.

Here’s what I built (again):

👥 Virtual Meeting Rooms

→ Join as live avatars, synced with spatial audio
→ See who’s talking, where they’re looking, and what they’re interacting with

📊 Dual Presentation Mode

→ Flip seamlessly between 3D models and slide decks
→ Control everything via Oculus controllers

🧠 Sticky Note Brainstorming

→ Toss, group, write, and drag notes in spatial infinity
→ Infinite canvas. Real collaboration. No tabs.

🧪 Lightweight Multiplayer Networking

→ Photon Engine handled real-time sync
→ Built logic for avatar states, shared inputs, and persistent rooms

🎮 Cross-Platform Rewrite

→ Rebuilt all input logic from scratch
→ Re-architected build system for Android
→ Performance-tuned every frame for Quest’s mobile GPU

💸 The Outcome

Before (HoloLens)After (Oculus Quest)₹4,00,000/headset₹21,000/headsetLimited to demos & POCsUsable by actual teamsGaze-only, Windows-onlyController-native, Android-readySolo device useMulti-user, real-world collaboration

And the best part?
It started getting adopted by design, sales, and innovation teams in Fortune 500 orgs — for everything from product reviews to spatial brainstorming offsites.

🧑‍💻 My Role

I wasn’t just porting a product.
I was:

• Rewriting its input language from gaze to controller

• Rebuilding its foundation across two operating systems

• Debugging through guesswork and logs, because documentation was... let’s say optimistic

• Optimizing for a completely different hardware constraint

• Proving it could be done — and opening MR up to 10x more users

🧰 Tech Toolbox

🧠 Reflections

• Porting XR platforms is game design + engineering + archaeology.

• There’s no Stack Overflow tag for “this has never been done.”

• Accessibility isn’t just pricing — it’s usability, portability, and performance.

• The real win? Not the code. It was turning a shiny MR demo into something teams could actually use.

TL;DR

We took spatial collaboration from proof of concept to plug-and-play.
From ₹4L exclusivity → ₹21K accessibility.
From solo headset demos → real-time team brainstorms.

It was hard.
It was fun.
It was the future — made usable.