On this Page

Prepare Your Experience

To upload your experience to Meadow you need to do a few things in Unity:

• Add all your GameObjects as children to one root GameObject.
• Add a Meadow Experience component to the root GameObject.
• Turn the root GameObject into a prefab in your project folder.
• Add the folder to an asset bundle.

Here’s a detailed breakdown:

Add your experience as children to an empty GameObject

1. In Unity, right click in the Hierarchy and choose Create Empty. Name it MyExperience. This is the root object of your experience, that will contain all the other objects.

Important: Make sure that the root object is at position X = 0, Y = 0, Z = 0. Otherwise your experience will be placed in the wrong location in Meadow.

1. Select all the objects that you have created for your experience.

1. Drag them on top of the new empty object. This turns them into children to that object.

Important: Make sure to not include any cameras in your prefab. The camera is automatically created by Meadow when your experience is opened.

In programming, ‘child’ means an object that is below another object in a hierarchy. Conversely, ‘parent’ is an object that is above another in the hierarchy. And, ‘sibling’ is an object that is on the same level in the hierarchy. A ‘root’ object is the object that is at the top of a hierarchy, that has no further parents.

In the example above you see that both the Fox and the Forest Sound are children of the newly created GameObject named MyExperience.

Add the Meadow Experience component to your root object

The Meadow Experience component tells the Meadow platform that this is an experience that should be displayed in the app.

1. Select the empty object you just created.
2. Press “Add Component”, search for Meadow Experience, and add it. The component is located in the namespace Meadow.
3. Unity also adds an AR Settings component, which holds the placement and AR settings. If your experience doesn’t use AR, press Disable AR on the Meadow Experience component to remove it. An experience without AR needs its own camera if it has visual content. Meadow also works for experiences without anything to look at, like interactive multiplayer audio experiences.

Important: Always use Meadow Experience, not the plain Experience component from the XREF namespace. The plain component is used internally and can cause unexpected behaviour in the Meadow app. If your experience already has a plain Experience component, select it and press Upgrade to MeadowExperience in the red banner at the top of the Inspector. Your settings are kept, and AR settings are moved to a new AR Settings component. If you don’t see the banner, update your packages.

Set your experience settings

The Meadow Experience and AR Settings components include a number of settings which tell the Meadow app how your experience should be presented in the app. For a full list of settings, see the Experience component documentation.

Here are the most important settings, found on the AR Settings component:

• Facing Direction:
  • User: Experience will open facing the user (non-geospatial only.)
  • North: Experience will face north (geospatial only.)

• Placement Distance: Distance from the user at which the experience will be placed (non-geospatial only.)

• Vertical Positioning:
  • Floor: Experience is placed on the floor.
  • Altitude: Experience is placed based on GPS altitude (often inaccurate, use with caution.)

Add your experience to the project folder

Now you need to add the experience you have created to your folder in the Project Window. When you do this, you create what is called a prefab. A prefab is a type of object that can be reused in different scenes, and also built as an asset bundle. Unity shows you that it is a prefab by changing the icon in the Hierarchy to a blue cube.

1. Select the root object of your experience (the one with the Meadow Experience component.)
2. Drag it into the empty area of your folder in the Project Window.

1. You should now see your experience in the folder, and the object turns blue in the Hierarchy. This is a prefab of your experience, and it is what will be played in Meadow.

Important: Changes to the prefab in your scene is not automatically applied to the prefab in your project folder. You need to manually apply any changes by selecting the prefab in the scene, finding the little toggle called “Overrides” in the inspector, and then press “Apply all”. This is so that you can have different settings for your prefab in different scenes, but it’s not really useful for our purposes. If you have changed things in your experience but the changes are not showing in Meadow, then forgetting to apply overrides is most likely the reason.

To apply all overrides, use the following keyboard shortcuts:

• On macOS: Press Cmd + Alt + A.
• On Windows: Press Ctrl + Alt + A.

Add your files to an asset bundle

Now we need to tell Unity that everything in this folder should be built into an asset bundle. Unity’s UX for this is a bit cumbersome, but you only need to do this once.

1. Navigate to your Assets folder in the Project Window.
2. Select your folder, but do not enter it.
3. At the bottom of the Inspector you find Asset Labels, with a dropdown called AssetBundle. If you don’t see it, press the small Asset Labels bar to expand it.
4. Press the dropdown that currently says None, and choose New….
5. Give your asset bundle a sensible name so you can easily recognize it later, and press Enter. This tells Unity that every file in this folder should be built into this asset bundle. This is what you will upload to Meadow.

Important: Do not use spaces, special characters or capital letters in the name of your asset bundle. This will cause errors when loading it in Meadow. Name it something like myfirstexperience, mrsnail or thesquarelevelone.

Upload your experience using Meadow Studio

Your experience is now ready to upload to Meadow! Follow the instructions in Upload to Meadow.