Meow Wolf The Navigator

The Navigator (Meow Wolf 2021)
Role: Sr. Designer / Developer of Interactive Technology
Exhibition at Meow Wolf Denver 2021

The Navigator, created for Meow Wolf’s XR implementation in Denver, is the world’s first interactive experience of its kind: a pilotable steel mixed reality robot. By manipulating the robot’s control panel visitors donning a Magic Leap headset can trigger room-scale mixed reality overlays to appear around them. The control panel includes LED, haptic, and sound-responsive capacitive touch nodes, track ball, sliders, joystick, and retina displays which trigger overlays created using Unity 3D. These overlays compliment and respond to the visitor’s interactions with the control panel, seamlessly blending tactile user input with both real world and digital output. As with all Meow Wolf installations, story drives the experience. Visitors are challenged from the moment they put on the HMD to navigate an alien star system through a series of puzzles in order to save their people from endless winter. The Navigator won an Auggie Award in 2019 for Best Art or Film and was also declared one of the top 50 XR experiences of 2019 by Forbes. A permanent installation of The Navigator will appear in Meow Wolf Denver in 2021.