Meadow: Your Gateway to Effortless XR Experience Creation

Aimed primarily at cultural organizations and events, Meadow is a platform whose ambition is to transform the creation, publishing and distribution of immersive experiences. The beta version of this tool has already proved its benefits, and the official launch will take place at the 2025 edition of Laval Virtual on April 9-11. Co-founder Jakob Skote and his team want to make XR creation accessible to all.

Can you tell us more about your company?

The goal of Meadow is to simplify XR creation to the point where anyone can become an XR creator. We’ve been working in this field for soon ten years and have seen it transform from a niche interest to a broad industry, where most people today have experienced immersive tech in one form or another. However, compared to photography and videomaking, the creation of immersive experiences is still highly complex and limited to professionals.

To address this, we have built a platform that allows you to upload experiences straight from Unity to the Meadow app, where you can experience them in AR or VR and instantly share them with your friends or audience. We believe the key to a broad adoption of XR is not one killer app, but a million killer experiences. Just like YouTube made everyone a videomaker, Meadow makes everyone an XR creator.

What will you exhibit at Laval Virtual?

We started building Meadow in 2023 and are now ready to show it to the world. The platform is currently in a closed beta limited to selected pilot projects, but in the first week of April we will soft launch to get more people aboard in shaping our vision. Participating in Laval Virtual is an integral part of this plan, and our way of positioning Meadow in the European XR ecosystem.

We look forward to introducing ourselves to the XR community, show what we are building, learn what everyone else is building, and find new interesting collaborations.

Are you planning any activities or demos at your booth?

To show the transformative potential of democratized XR, we are creating a special exhibition of public virtual art from our Nordic users in the streets of Laval. Expect unexpected encounters in the historical alleys of the city – from water spirits that respond to public data from the Mayenne river to collaborations between Danish and Ukrainian artists that punctuate the streets with reflections on ongoing conflicts. A handful of the artworks are multiplayer and some will be simultaneously placed outside the Swedish embassy in Paris, allowing you to interact with distant visitors through the experiences themselves. This illustrates our vision of a virtual commons where anyone can create their own vision of our virtual, post-spatial future.

If this inspires you to get your hands dirty and create something yourself, then head over to our booth in the exhibition, where we will conduct continuous demonstrations and workshops where you can create your own experiences and upload to Meadow. The three best ones will win a special prize – so make sure to come by and be creative with us!

Does your company have an innovation to share with us and our visitors?

Meadow’s core innovation is its seamless distribution system for XR experiences, that allows you to create anything from simple 3D objects in space to highly complex multiplayer experiences. We believe the key to great XR is interactivity and collectivity, where you and your friends have an experience together. The internet is multiplayer, no one would use Instagram if it only showed your own images. To solve this, we’ve built a comprehensive experience creation system on top of Unity that can handle anything from simple image tracking activations to complex multiplayer games.

As one developer using our platform noted: “I wanted to explore adding real world reflections to my AR experience, something that usually would have taken me at least a couple of hours of tinkering back and forth to get it to work cross platform, but with Meadow I just needed to toggle ‘Enable Reflections’ and it worked straight away.“

The multiplayer capabilities of Meadow have the interesting effect in that they make it simple to create your own experimental social networks in XR. We’ve seen this used in interesting ways, for example, by turning all participants into pink reindeer in Pastelae’s wonderful artwork Berget, or in the site-specific AR communication network Interspatial Echoes, where messages written by the participants flow over all the town squares of Europe.

But at the core of it, our innovation is our focus on democratizing the entire XR creation process rather than just the viewing part, which places Meadow uniquely at the intersection of creation tool and distribution platform. Our next development phase will continue to evolve this position with a focus on in-app creation tools, which let you build experiences just using your phone. Our aim is for this to become a two-way street where consumers can become creators and vice versa, which will benefit the broader XR market.

How is your solution transforming your business field?

Numerous artists, institutions and festivals use Meadow to create engaging XR experiences for a fraction of the cost of building bespoke apps. This makes it possible for smaller players to use XR, which earlier has been out of reach due to budget or skill constraints. One notable example is the exhibition Vävda rum (Woven places), which placed ten virtual artworks at over 1600 locations all across Sweden during the summer of 2023. The exhibition had over 15,000 visitors and was a great testament to how XR can bring contemporary art to places where it’s often lacking. In the small town of Säffle one visitor exclaimed “I can imagine seeing art like this in London or Stockholm, but to see it on my streets – that’s incredible!”

Meadow was used by the British Art Fair as a low-cost alternative for young up-and-coming artists to participate in the exhibition. The audience entered an empty room, and through scanning a QR code on the wall with their phone, they could experience fifteen artworks that did everything from fill the room with bees and flowers to transforming it into highly detailed 3D scans of trees from London’s streets. The artists paid a fraction of the normal price for participating (£25 instead of £4000), and the fair saved over 90% compared to building a bespoke solution.  A selection of these artworks are shown in our booth in the exhibition, and if you’re an interested collector – some of them are for sale.

But Meadow is not limited to the arts – many sectors can benefit from a simplified XR distribution system. Outside of the art world we have a number of small pilot projects in advertising, corporate events and cultural heritage, and our soft launch and participation in Laval Virtual will act as a springboard to find new use cases.

Sustainability and the environment are key topics of this century. How do you cope with these concerns in your XR technologies?

Virtual technologies make it possible to create large-scale cultural experiences with a minimal environmental impact. For example, the British Art Fair exhibition is now travelling to India, with the only carbon footprint being a minimal impact from our servers instead of that from shipping physical boxes of art with plane or boat.

But environmental sustainability is only one dimension of what makes a technology sustainable in the broad sense. The current XR landscape suffers from a digital divide where power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies, whose walled gardens dictate what visions of our immersive future are allowed. This cultural unsustainability limits the potential of spatial computing as a truly revolutionary technology, and makes any potential metaverses conformative and lame – something which also has a negative impact on the XR market, since general consumers are loath to adopt tech that is perceived as being the corporate fever dreams of a handful of tech giants stuck in the past.

By democratizing XR creation, we aim to help in the creation of a truly public virtual space, which, like physical space, is accessible to everyone. The creation of our shared future needs to be in the hands of everyone partaking in it, regardless of whether it’s physical or virtual.