Cosmic Sphincter

Go to the center and find the light.

An installation experience in using room-scale VR, tracked objects, and human actors, making it a sort of MR theater-piece. Players enter the center of the universe, where they encounter...the unexpected.

Requirements:

Sure you can download it, but the true installation requires a cleared space of about 10' x 15', a Vive HMD, a LeapMotion sensor, a Vive tracker mounted to a low-level electrocution circuit powered by a battery pack, 1-2 actors, and air cannons.

Technical:

Hands are tracked with a LeapMotion sensor mounted to a VIVE, and the hand avatars are synced with that data. A VIVE tracker was mounted to an IKEA lamp, its internals stripped and replaced with a battery pack leading to an array of exposed nail-heads - the nails are wired to the battery pack such that touching any 2 nail-heads closes the circuit and the user gets a mild shock, similar to those toy hand buzzers made famous by the Joker in Batman. We use this and aircanons to simulate the explosion/ big bang.

Some early dev:

Participant play-through:

Made for PIGSquad's Summer Slow Jams 2018 - Mini-games: The World is Alive jam.

Credits:

David Bynum

Daniel Chamberlin