Quest Controller Input Mapping

By: Aarav Kumar, 2025

Interacting with the virtual world starts with understanding how to capture inputs from controllers. Whether you're building a game, an interactive experience, or a utility app, recognizing button presses, trigger pulls, and joystick movements is essential for responsive and immersive interactions.

This tutorial will break down how to get controller inputs from Meta Quest in Unity. You'll learn how to access button states, track thumbstick movement, and integrate these inputs into your project. This tutorial will give you a foundation to make your application react to user interactions from the controllers.

You can create your own script to implement any of these types of controller mappings for your project, and follow the documentation (link, link2) to design your script to map to different actions based on the controller's individual or combined inputs. Alternatively, you can use the Controller Mapping building block provided by Meta on Unity to easily map controller inputs to specific actions in your scene, requiring you to write minimal code and simplifying the mapping process. 

This tutorial will focus on the building block method, but feel free to try writing your own mapping script if you feel comfortable / want to implement very precise forms of mapping. 

Steps for Controller Mapping 

From the top menu, navigate to Meta > Tools > Building Blocks. 

Search for the "Controller Buttons Mapper" building block, and click the "add" button to add it to your scene (or drag and drop it into your scene directly). Any dependencies of Controller Buttons Mapper (in this case the Camera Rig) will automatically be installed when you add it to your scene, so don't be surprised if you see extra elements show up.

Also add the Controller Tracking and Passthrough building blocks (the latter is need if you want passthrough interactions, but don't add it if you want to be purely in VR).

As a sample interactive element, we can now create a simple cube to interact with using our controller buttons. In your scene, look for the + icon to add an asset, and navigate to 3D Object > Cube to make a cube in your scene. 

Then, in your scene view, look for the Move Tool (should be an icon with an arrow in each direction, right under the hand icon). Select the move tool and then select the cube in your scene view to move its position along the 3 axes. 

Move the cube to be in front of the Camera Rig element so that it is visible to the user when they launch the app -- you can check the direction of the Camera Rig by selecting it in the hierarchy.

You can also position, scale, and rotate the cube directly from the inspector window on the right. To make the cube smaller, for example, I changed each of its X, Y, and Z scale fields to 0.1 (rather than 1, which is the default)