The Egg XR
Approaching the concept of virtual afterlives, The Egg XR expands upon poet Andy Weir’s popular short story “The Egg”, diving through the phenomenology of life, death, and reincarnation. Developed within the 5th Wall Forum Connectors Program, Winter 2020-Spring 2021, this project was an exploration toward how we might cultivate togetherness from solitude, plurality from selfhood, and presence from absence.
Seeking to subvert typical VR locomotion interaction paradigms, I thought swimming through this central amniotic hub would deepen immersion into these celestial spheres where the laws of physics no longer apply. The user can move their arms in front stroke, backstroke, or even breast stroke to move throughout the environment. Additionally, a single user’s in-world corporeal identity is multiplied, as each hand is conveyed as a separate fish. These two fish characters are also linked to multiple schools of colorful fish, that flock in AI-driven murmurations and respond to the user’s movements in unique playful behaviors.
As I set about prototyping experiences within this thematic framework, I really wanted to emphasize embodied cognition & the poetics of human-computer interaction, extending the senses and our organic behaviors into new depths of self both in and out of the virtual frame. As this was adapted from a poem that concerns death and rebirth, I considered how dying is most commonly a lose-state in most gameplay conventions, usually resulting in a respawn to a moment shortly before the player runs out of HP or falls off a platform for a do-over without losing much progress. However, in this instance we saw an opportunity in how death sets the stage for cycles of rebirth, always returning to one central cosmic lobby before launching into the user’s next journey, completely different than the one that preceded it.
