Experience a unique blend of whimsy and wackiness in this tactile VR comedy game about hands and the things you didn’t know they could do.

Enter a surreal VR garden where fingers flit around like butterflies and hands bloom like flowers. You’ll navigate through increasingly unhinged challenges using nothing but your own virtual hands. Detach fingers to solve puzzles, pollinate promiscuously with hand-flowers, and discover the strange creatures inhabiting this paradise. But beware – as you progress deeper into the garden, your control begins to slip, even over your own hands…

This game prototype is still a work in progress. It follows a What the Golf-style structure where players discover new surprising mechanics in each level.

It uses Oculus hand tracking to control the player’s virtual hands and interact naturally with the world. The hands use a physically-simulated hand model that can be controlled procedurally or using Unity’s animation system.

Conceptual goals

• Examine virtual embodiment and our assumptions about avatars in virtual spaces.
  For example: what happens when the notion of being a contiguous flesh blob in real life doesn’t extend to virtual worlds, and a player has control over disconnected (“severed”) body parts?
• Explore the virtual grotesque.
  Can we frame the real life grotesque differently in virtual worlds? Having a visceral negative reaction at severed body parts is an evolutionary response, but what purpose does this reaction serve in virtual worlds? Loosening control over our own bodies allows us to achieve more in virtual worlds—and so it’s likely that body modification becomes an advantage in virtual spaces.
• Explore how avatars affect emotional expression.
  The game uses yellow emoji-styled hands ✋🤘✌️ intentionally. We already know how to regulate our emotional expression over message. We use emojis to hide and embellish our emotions. Avatars allow wider expression than text, but the same degree of regulation. Avatar emotes today are one example of embellishment.
• Do all this in an approachable way.
  I think the best conceptual art is aesthetic and approachable (and fun!) but also offers depth for those who seek it.