Schools crossing the sunbeams in the sunlit grotto

Mixed reality for Meta Quest 3

Thousands of fish,
in your own room.

Living Room Aquarium fills your real room with living schools of tropical fish. They flow around your sofa, swim beneath a shimmering surface on your ceiling, and react to you: they scatter if you move fast, and come closer if you hold out a calm, open hand.

How you play

The photoreal coral reef: sand, eelgrass and coral colonies under rippling sunlight

What it is

Not a screensaver. Every fish steers itself.

Up to 6,000 fish swim at once, and each follows a few simple rules: keep a little space, swim the way your neighbours swim, stay with the group.

Fish stay mostly level, bank into turns and beat their tails in time with their speed. Startle one, and the fright ripples through the school as a wave while its silver flanks flash. Each school has a mind that plans what to do next: explore, rest under cover, forage, or keep away from a hunter.

Your powers live on your wrists

Everything appears from a gesture

Turn the back of a wrist toward your face and a small glowing bead appears on it. Touch it, and its beads fly out to float in front of you, ready to tap. Nothing looks like a flat app window, and the fish stay the show.

Command a school

Turn on hero mode and hold out your palm: one school out of thousands turns to face you. Draw circles in the air and it swirls round you.

The bubble gun

Make a finger gun and drop your thumb. The bubble catches a fish and floats it, tumbling, to the surface.

Feed them

Rub your fingers together to trickle flakes. Hungry fish take turns darting out to snap them up.

Build a reef

A 1950s ray gun places schools of fish, corals and toys, and sprays your walls with sand, crust or gold.

A window on the wall of a dark room, golden jacks and coral visible through it — A window into the reef, drawn on a wall. In the headset, the dark around it is your own room.

Your room is home

The holodeck has other programs

From the main menu on your left wrist, sink your room into the seabed, or step into a coral reef, a sunlit sea cave, or the open ocean on the back of a giant sea turtle.

Or stay where you are: draw a window on your wall and look into the reef, alive right where it would be beyond the wall. Turn the window into a portal, and the reef's fish swim through into your room.

Fusiliers and bannerfish streaming over the shell of the great turtle the player rides — Riding a great turtle

A swirling ball of silversides in the grotto, a sunbeam behind — A bait ball in the grotto

Seen from the player’s shell, a great turtle’s head breaking the surface to breathe — A turtle comes up to breathe

The pygmy blue whale, side-on, filling the frame — The pygmy blue whale

Fusiliers streaming up toward the bright surface of the open ocean — The living surface, from below

Bannerfish and silversides over the coral reef — The coral reef

The circular control, its rings of light around a live miniature of the selected school, the schools’ panel beside it — The circular control

What players said

“Fun and intuitive.”

Four first-time players tried it outdoors, and every one found their way through the menus. The first session with the bubble gun ran long because it was “so much fun”.

Meet the fish See the places

Thousands of fish,in your own room.