How to publish an interactive Unity AR piece to Meadow
Meadow is a Unity-first AR publishing platform with a shared iOS/Android viewer app that supports Google Geospatial VPS and Cloud Anchors—so you can deploy interactive AR without building your own app.
Prerequisites
- ✓Unity 6 or newer (the free Personal license is enough)
- ✓A Meadow account (request access if you don't have one yet)
- ✓An iPhone or Android phone with the Meadow app installed
- ✓Basic familiarity with the Unity editor
Step-by-Step Guide
Install Unity 6
Unity installs are managed through Unity Hub. Meadow requires Unity 6 or newer, and the free Personal license is all you need.
- •Download Unity Hub from unity.com/download, sign in and install a Unity 6 editor.
- •When prompted, add both the iOS Build Support and Android Build Support modules. Both are needed, even if you only plan to target one platform.
- •Activate a Personal license. You do not need Unity Pro to publish on Meadow.
Install Meadow Studio
Meadow Studio is the Unity plugin that connects your project to Meadow. Download it from your Meadow dashboard.
- •Sign in at app.meadow.space and open Dashboard → Meadow Studio.
- •Click Download and drag the downloaded package into your Unity Project window.
- •A Meadow tab now appears in the Unity editor menu.
Build your experience
Import your 3D models (FBX or OBJ), audio and other assets, and arrange them in your scene. Unity uses meters, so check the scale of imported models against a default 1×1×1 cube.
- •Add interactivity with Unity Visual Scripting and Meadow's Experience Builder nodes: touch, audio, animation, dialogue, save data and more.
- •Custom C# scripts are not supported. Convert any existing scripts to Visual Scripting graphs.
- •Don't add a camera. Meadow creates the AR camera when your experience opens.
Turn it into an Experience prefab
Meadow loads your experience as a single prefab with an Experience component on its root.
- •Create an empty GameObject at position 0, 0, 0 and drag all of your experience's objects onto it as children.
- •Add the Experience component (namespace XREF) to the root object and choose its Facing Direction, Placement Distance and Vertical Positioning.
- •Drag the root object into your Project folder to create the prefab. Remember to apply overrides (Cmd/Ctrl + Alt + A) after later changes in the scene.
Assign an asset bundle
Everything in your experience folder is built into an asset bundle, which is what gets uploaded to Meadow. You only need to do this once.
- •Select your experience folder in the Project window (without entering it).
- •Under Asset Labels at the bottom of the Inspector, create a new asset bundle.
- •Use a lowercase name without spaces or special characters, e.g. "myexperience".
Create the experience on Meadow
Each upload belongs to an experience you create in the Meadow web app.
- •In your dashboard, go to Experiences and click "+ New Experience". Only a title is required to start.
- •Under Distribution, keep "Available anywhere" for testing, or search for a location on the map to place it.
- •Choose a placement type: In Front Of Camera, or Geospatial to anchor it to a real-world location with Google's Visual Positioning System.
- •Save it as a draft.
Upload with Meadow Studio
Back in Unity, open the Meadow Studio window from the Meadow tab and log in with your Meadow account.
- •Open the experience you created and pick your asset bundle from the Asset Bundle dropdown.
- •Set the bundle type to Experience and select the platforms to build for.
- •Click Upload to Meadow. The first build takes a while; later uploads are faster. Repeat whenever you want to push an update.
Test and publish
Open the Meadow app on your phone and log in with the same account. Your experience is listed on your profile. Tap it, then "Enter Experience" to see it in AR.
- •Invite collaborators from the Permissions tab in the web app, as Viewers or Editors.
- •When you're happy, click Publish in the web app. Published experiences need an image and a description.
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