Tender Claws, the studio behind Stranger Issues VR (2024) and Digital Digital Actuality (2017), introduced they’re debuting one other patently bizarre VR expertise at SXSW this week, which is all about swapping views by making eye contact.
The VR expertise, known as Face Leaping, actually appears like one other one in every of Tender Claws’ wildly ingenious experiments into digital actuality, because it’s debuting the expertise on Meta Quest Professional alongside a number of others within the XR Expertise Exhibition at SXSW’s Fairmont location subsequent week.
The 30-minute expertise is slated to serve up eye-tracked interactions that lets the participant change views by making eye contact with characters, animals, and objects. The studio says Face Leaping invitations gamers to “mirror on the act of seeing and being seen, evoking questions on notion, consciousness, and the way we connect with others by way of a look.”
Whereas most not too long ago identified for creating Stranger Issues VR, the LA-based studio was additionally behind the mind-bending theatrical expertise The Underneath Presents (2019), which included dwell performers interacting with at-home customers.
It calls Face Leaping “a return to Tender Claws’ roots in experimental storytelling, multi-layered narratives, and absurdist explorations of expertise and human connection.”
Tender Claws hasn’t revealed whether or not it’s releasing Face Leaping past the expertise’s debut at SXSW, which will likely be open to badge holders on March ninth – eleventh in Austin, Texas.
Because it primarily makes use of eye-tracking, it might hypothetically come to any variety of platforms, together with Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional, Meta Quest Professional, and PSVR 2. We’ve reached out to the studio to make clear this, and can replace this piece when/if we all know extra.
