Race Against Time
A mixed-reality race to plant five trees before trash buries your real room.
- Year
- 2025
- Reading
- 03 min
- Figures
- 06
Race Against Time is a mixed-reality game for Meta Quest, built at MIT Reality Hack 2025: plant and water five trees while your real room fills with trash against a ticking clock. Using Meta’s MRUK and Effect Mesh, the game spawns around any space to turn sustainability awareness into felt urgency.
- Role
- Unity developer & video editor
- Team
- Elle Zhou
- Yiming “Danny” Huang
- Xuefei Wang
- Andy Yu
- Ruby Wang
- Disciplines
- Mixed reality
- Game design
- Sustainability
- Hackathon
- Tools
- Unity / C# / Meta Quest / Meta MRUK / Effect Mesh / STYLY / Blender / Polycam
- Recognition
- Winner, Standing on the Shoulders of Sustainability — MIT Reality Hack 2025
Big, broad environmental issues tend to feel a long way from anyone’s own life.
We wanted to close that distance — to bring the problem into the player’s own room, and put it on a clock.
Five trees. Rising trash. One clock.
Players plant and water five trees in a space increasingly overwhelmed by uncontrolled waste — the relentless pace of environmental degradation under modern consumerism.
Water is limited. Players collect water babies, telling clean sources from polluted ones, fill a water gun and race to grow each tree while the trash keeps mounting and the clock keeps ticking.
The game is built on contrasts — passive waste generation against active ecological restoration — to expose the irony between our environmental ideals and the reality of our actions.
Fig. 01Onboarding: how to grow your tree.
Fig. 02Index finger to grab and plant, middle finger to fire.
We call for actual actions to save the environment.”
Awareness alone isn’t action.
It began with what we noticed at MIT Reality Hack: an unsettling amount of trash scattered around the hackerspace.
That pointed to a deeper problem. Awareness of sustainability issues has grown significantly through media, news and environmental campaigns — but awareness alone often doesn’t translate into meaningful action.
Race Against Time was born to bridge that gap: an experience that makes the urgency of environmental degradation felt, and inspires people to take responsibility for their own impact on the planet.
5
trees to plant and water before time runs out
180 s
on the clock at the start of a run
10 : 5
water from a clean vs. a polluted water baby
Sketched in STYLY, built in Unity.
We used STYLY to craft a scene that blends nature’s liveliness into a modern apartment filled with trash bags.
After prototyping, the entire mixed-reality experience was made in Unity for Quest. Meta’s MRUK and Effect Mesh let the game environment spawn dynamically around the player’s real space.
The trash is real, too: common waste we saw at MIT Reality Hack, converted into prefabs with Polycam.
What I built
- 01
Effect Mesh integration
Integrated Meta’s Effect Mesh with the game content so it supports most indoor and outdoor environments.
- 02
Spatial anchors
Anchored game content in passthrough so it stays put in the real room.
- 03
Interactions
Player interactions with game objects.
- 04
Particle effects
The game’s particle effects.
- 05
Game UI
The water gun, score display and trees display.
- 06
Team film
Edited our team video.
Water made of particles.
Because the spraying water is a particle effect, getting a planted tree to detect collisions with it — and update its growth bar every time water hit — was harder than it looked.
Spawning everything dynamically as prefabs, with barely any assets placed in the scene, was its own puzzle. And since the game loads around your environment, interactable world-space UI had to spawn right in front of the player.
What we’re proudest of: MR interactions and game logic that are fully playable in almost any indoor space.
More contrasts.
Next, we want to create more experiences that contrast an aspect of our environment with our unconscious actions — mountain fires, overfishing, oil-rig leaks — so more people living in cities can feel the disconnect between our environmental ideals and what we actually do.
