Tenderclaws debuted their first piece in competition at SXSW with a short called FACE JUMPING, which was a surreal, seemingly open world experience with a number of interactive experiments leveraging eye tracking in novel ways. Tenderclaws has consistently pushed the edges of locomotion in everyone of their interactive narratives, and FACE JUMPING is no exception. If you lock eyes with another character for long enough, and you’ll have an opportunity to swap perspectives with them, which allows you to progress through various different vignettes. There’s a deeply poetic story that’s unfolding, but I found that I needed a lot of decoding of the dream logic, metaphors, and allegories within my conversation with Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro. But it’s the type of experience that I wanted to play again and again to continue to explore this world, and all of the novel eye tracking experiments that I missed. FACE JUMPING was my second favorite piece of the festival, and it ended up winning the Audience Award for the SXSW XR Experience Competition, and it was also one of the hottest tickets during the festival.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling in the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my series of looking at different experiences from South by Southwest 2025, today's episode is with a piece called Face Jumping by Tender Claws. So anybody who's familiar with Tender Claws with Virtual Reality 1, there's Stranger Things, there's Virtual Reality 2, there's the Under Presents and their immersive theater performances they gave with the Tempest. So Tender Claws is, I think, one of the most innovative development shops out there for virtual reality. They're always pushing the edge for what's possible with the medium. And this year is no different. After coming off of like three years of working on Stranger Things, they want to do a little bit shorter project. And so they wanted to push the edge of what's possible with eye tracking. So this concept of face jumping is it's kind of unique. You can think about it as when you lock eyes with somebody and if you like would push a button, then you would suddenly swap perspectives with this other person. And so they take this conceit and you're able to kind of navigate around. these worlds. And it feels like an open world, just like a very typical tinder clause type of experience, but it's very narrowed down in terms of a curated experience. But there is some branches that you can go off to and experience these little vignettes and experiments from eye tracking. They really started with trying to push forward these different eye tracking mechanics and then structured this narrative around it. It feels a little bit like a dream logic type of narrative where I had to have a lot of the different specifics and nuances of the story decoded for me in this conversation with Danny and Samantha. But at the same time, you can walk away from this experience just having this totally surreal, absurdist type of pushing the edge of interaction and locomotion. And it's always just a wild journey that you're taking on in a Tender Claws experience. And face jumping actually did end up winning the audience award for the XR experience competition this year at Southwest Southwest. So we're coming all that and more on today's episode of Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Danny and Samantha happened on Monday, March 10th, 2025 at the Southwest Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:24.313] Samantha Gorman: Hi, my name is Samantha Gorman and I'm the co-studio lead and narrative director at Tender Cloths.
[00:02:32.253] Danny Cannizzaro: I'm Danny Cannizzaro. I'm the other studio lead of Tender Claws.
[00:02:36.099] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:40.831] Samantha Gorman: Sounds great. Yeah. So my background started, I was very interested in poetry, and I did poetry undergrad, and then I wanted to learn about how to make words in space, essentially, which led me into working inside a cave virtual environment for eight years in early, early VR. And I did a background, kind of a mix of theater, media studies, computer science, and creative writing.
[00:03:05.004] Danny Cannizzaro: And I originally come from a painting background into animation, into interactive. And then I've been collaborating with Samantha on projects for a couple decades now. And our projects have spanned VR, installation, AR, novels, films, sports, played with leaf blowers and tumbleweeds, kind of a wide range.
[00:03:26.667] Kent Bye: Well, I know we've had a chance to have a number of different conversations over the years of all your various different projects. And so when you look at Face Jumping that's premiering here at South by Southwest, maybe you could briefly recap your journey into VR and maybe like what you were exploring in each of your projects leading up to this project, like where you wanted to take the next step.
[00:03:48.945] Samantha Gorman: Sure, yeah. So we've actually been making released VR and headsets since around 2014. I think that was virtual virtual reality. And one of the things that our training, you know, as artists also enable and part of what our studio does best is thinking about the affordance and constraints of different platforms and media and how can you push like the technology in a meaningful way where the mechanics also ties into the story. So regardless of what platform or technology we're investigating or operating in, it's very essential that there is a sort of a narrative and a pushing the technical limits of things, even from the early days of virtual reality, from the iPad app, all the way to thinking about gaze for this project.
[00:04:33.868] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, I think each of our projects, we try and take on something that's new to the studio, something that makes us work a little bit out of our comfort zone. So, like, VVR was our first Unity project and game at all that we made. For that iPad book, it was, like, really exploring what the future of reading could be. When we did the theater piece, we were like, well, what if we know how to do a VR project? What if we bring live actors into the mix? With Stranger Things VR, we're like, we've made our own stories. What's it like to work with a big existing fan base and existing IP and weaving something into that? This latest one kind of jumped off of what would it be like to make a project for eye tracking which is a difficult input method to meaningfully use and what type of project experience would that lead to.
[00:05:15.592] Kent Bye: Yeah, I remember seeing some of the very early eye tracking demos where sometimes it was difficult to see if it was working. Or the best thing I could see is if there was a recording of an avatar and I could go back and see it. So it's something that feels like it's very subtle in terms of the interaction. very much unconscious in a lot of ways. And I think there's been a lot of avoidance of overloading too much user interface types of things with the eye to not make it fatiguing. I think the Apple Vision Pro has done an amazing job of integrating eye tracking in this seamless way that makes it just feel magical. But when you're thinking about it in the context of how do you start to reveal the subtle nature of this as a technology, as a design problem that I think you are starting to really dive into with this project. So I'm just curious how you started to get that feedback loop of having the eyes and getting the tracking, because that's something traditionally that I've seen. It's like, oh, this is kind of actually more difficult to have the user observe or see, but then also design a whole experience around that seems to be like a design space that was relatively unexplored that you're really pushing the edge here. But I'm just curious where you started to begin with looking at either examples or approaches for how to even tackle this type of problem.
[00:06:30.666] Danny Cannizzaro: I do think it is a really tricky space to design for, for a couple of reasons. It's tiring to have to consciously look at specific things. It feels like it should be something that like, oh, the player's just already doing, you can just respond to it seamlessly. But it's something that players do often without intention. When you're looking around, it's not always because you are actively making a decision about wanting to do it. And as soon as you start to have to kind of like think about what am I looking at, it's a little bit like when you start thinking about breathing and all of a sudden you become aware of having to breathe. And so it takes this mental energy. And so because of that, I think we kind of landed on the idea of not just doing a project around eye tracking, but specifically around the moments of eye contact, because that is a more powerful, kind of like deeper, resonant, intuitive experience. kind of human gesture and that moment of eye contact being a space where two beings are trying to understand one another and using that as a moment where you would just swap perspectives and then kind of from that idea a lot of little vignettes, experiments, prototypes kind of balloon down.
[00:07:36.752] Samantha Gorman: There's various different prototypes within the experience, too, beyond the making eye contact. And I think one of the ones that is my favorite are really because of my interest in like poetry and space was what reading and eye tracking can do together. And you see that in some of the if you go down on the escalator, you know, and part of the project and you meet a certain character, you can read the text and it's very much gaze based, like as the text kind of falls away and focuses on where you're looking.
[00:08:07.827] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, that would be one of the other big things we did with this. And that actually felt most similar to our first project, Pry, where there's a couple sections where, as you are reading it, it is responding to you reading it. And so that is another thing that we like just scratch the surface of on this one but are really interested in continuing to explore like you reading text hearing different sounds associated with the text as you're reading it what is your own internal dialogue how does that mix with some imposed external dialogue as you're reading through text so we start on that and we'd probably love to keep pushing that in future projects
[00:08:43.567] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you're speaking, another thing that comes to mind is that there's another key feature of all the Turner Claus projects, which is that there's always some sort of locomotion innovation that you're playing with for how to move through space. I think there's like a consistent new experiment on that in every project that you've done. And so I'd love to maybe can do a recap of like some of the different ways that for every project you're finding some new way to move around, because this is yet another innovation of locomotion that you've been able to fuse together other aspects of your previous locomotion techniques. But yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more of an elaboration of that.
[00:09:17.668] Danny Cannizzaro: So, would you start with Pry?
[00:09:19.829] Samantha Gorman: I can start with Pry. Yeah, so Pry was our iPad project, and it's still actually somehow functional, many, many, maybe a decade or so, I don't know. But it is a e-book where it is also a film and game, and part of the different interfaces that you have is you actually turn, instead of a page turn, we wanted to experiment with what it was like to open, pinch open a character's eyes and see the space from what they were looking at, what they could see in the world. And then if you let go, it would go back into their thoughts. And every time you like pinched open, it could jump ahead into the film so that it was like going nonlinear through the narrative.
[00:09:57.020] Danny Cannizzaro: And I think the reason we play with this is we really feel that the way you experience an interactive media is part of the experience itself or things are better when those are paired. So rather than it just being like, oh yeah, you use the joystick to walk through a world and that gets you to the next thing and it's just kind of like getting you to the next content, we want the way you move through an interactive project to be part of the project. So VVR, you're taking off headsets, making a little pantomime gesture of removing a headset to go through different worlds. We also played with teleporting there at a time when like before teleporting became super standard, like us and the other companies were trying out teleporting and that. And then the Under Presents was a game about collapsing time and space. So we made a gesture where you could reach onto a nebulous area and pull it towards you. And the world would kind of accordion into you. And then when you let go, it would on accordion behind you and be standing in the new position. Stranger Things VR, really looking at Vecna's control over the vines and just thinking how fun it would be to be able to use that to position yourself and move and move in a way that was a little bit magical and fling yourself through the space. On VVR2, we had the idea that instead of teleporting through the world, every time you wanted to move around, you could go from externally controlling the character with your body to being kind of a tiny little member of the mind spaceship pilot, where you would pilot your own body as if it was a giant mech and have to navigate through. standing at a window, pulling down levers to turn, upping the throttle. And then this project, like I said, the moment of eye contact. So most of the project, you're not actually using the joysticks. There's a couple beats you can. Most of the time, you're moving around by making eye contact, staring into someone's eyes. The world kind of like fish eyes for a second. And if you keep looking, it rubber bands you and you snap into their perspective.
[00:11:45.956] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's a number of different immersive theater pieces that I can think of, like both Third Rail projects, Then She Fell, as well as Sleep No More, where there's these one-on-one encounters where you have an interaction with an immersive theater actor. And a lot of that has to do with this really intimate eye gaze. And there's been a number of different VR projects that have these moments of looking back. One of the winners of Venice Immersive during the pandemic was a piece where one of the animated characters would suddenly stop and look at you as you were in their private space and you're suddenly implicated as this boundary between public and private is collapsing and so there is this confrontation that happens through the body language of when someone is like locking eyes with you and and starting to stare at you and so wondering if you could unpack that moment the what you notice what that means sociologically or in different immersive experiences because it's a it's a powerful moment when you have it but at the same time there can be other implications that are coming up that is confronting in a way that you're being challenged but it's this catalyst to completely swap your perspective of reality so just curious if there's any like inspirations for how you start to think about that as a concept
[00:13:00.256] Danny Cannizzaro: You should talk about The Under, which was ironically a project where no characters had eyes, but we had the exact same confrontation, proof of liveness. NPC would suddenly be inhabited by a live person.
[00:13:12.148] Samantha Gorman: Yeah. So actually a lot of the, I guess you could say eye contact and gaze tracking came from the moment of power in the under where you're thinking about, okay, well, how do you indicate liveness? How do you get attention of an audience? Even though, you know, it was very much mask work. We worked with the actors to focus on that moment a lot when all their attention would swivel and their body language and their head would swivel to a player. And you could see that the players were just like stopped, like arrested in a moment. and then became very interested and engaged and like being drawn into what was happening with them and the actor. So I think that very much relates to a lot of the immersive theater one-on-one experiences. And here, especially I think in the first scene, we have a scene that is sort of a, I guess you could say a shoot-off and then it can expand into a world where that could just dramatically look at you and kind of like, the metaphor becomes like large and absurdist and then that sort of sets the tone for a lot of what's happening in the project one of the very first scenes that i really wanted in the game that was important to me was being trapped in the elevator with another person where it's just like silence and i feel like that's a really potent moment of like making eye contact or not making eye contact where it's not just like eye contact is like an intensity or a power move, but also like as like social aversion or as a sort of like behavior of either like connectedness or agreement to disconnect.
[00:14:38.450] Danny Cannizzaro: One of the things that also led to us considering that moment is it's a moment that is a little bit unique from just looking at in the general direction of someone. We were trying to find beats where eye tracking in particular would really shine. And so that locking eyes is something like more specific than just like looking towards someone. And so it's kind of like we took all those things that we're learning from the under and they're like, all right, well, what can we do with like actually adding in these things? eye tracking. It's a single player experience versus a live thing, so there's a difference there. But yeah, spent a lot of time in the project adding look at IKs so that the characters are looking exactly at your eyes rather than an inch to the left because you feel the difference in a meaningful way.
[00:15:18.431] Kent Bye: And I know that in virtual reality one and two, there's this way that you and also all your pieces probably have this ambiguous narrative structure in the sense that it feels like an open world. But yet there's ways that you're subtly guiding decisions that are seemingly being made, but maybe are not actual choices, but you're still having user actions. And then sometimes there are choices. So it's kind of like you don't always quite know what's sending you down a different branch or what is going to be like a golden path that everybody is going to be going on. And so I'd love it if you can maybe describe how you start to think about the narrative structure of this piece, Face Jumping.
[00:15:57.048] Samantha Gorman: Interestingly, this piece was different than, at least for me, in narrative design than many of the pieces because one of the things that came through was like a artistic inclination to make prototypes. And then the prototypes themselves sort of emerged into a narrative. Whereas sometimes the other pieces is like a little bit of world building and then, you know, backwards design the script and then like the mechanics and the interaction that tie very much into the world itself. And in this case, it was like the gesture spoke to a sort of narrative of continuation. And it was very much, I guess, narratively pinning the different prototypes together. There are some things you can miss, but in a way that felt like there was a progression or momentum building up rather than per se like a specific plot beat or point that you had to hit.
[00:16:53.467] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, this is one where it was a quick timeline for us. We made the whole thing in about six months, whereas the last few projects have been more like one year, two and a half years, like longer runs. But if you were to play it at the early stage, there were beats where it was even more DreamLogic freeform, less structured, and it definitely was something where as we were making it, we were letting it go expansive outward and then sewing it back together and trying to find the right amount of guide rails for people to latch onto to feel like they're having some progression but still letting it operate in this kind of like absurdist, intuitive connection from beat to beat rather than very explicit world building. You need to know the exact backstory of what that bird in the waiting room was doing.
[00:17:38.982] Kent Bye: And where did you begin with some of these prototypes in terms of like, was it a character? Was it the world or was it a specific interaction with the eye gaze? And just curious how you would iterate to find the evolution of each of these different vignettes and these prototypes.
[00:17:55.563] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, so I think we just as a team brainstormed a lot of different things we thought would work well around that idea of moments of eye connection. So the elevator space, a more Monkey Island-esque waiting room where everyone is like, not looking at each other, but you can jump around through it, but you have to get someone's attention in a unique way. Something where you were clouds and there's just like tons of little people below you. And then we started brainstorming repeat visits to those scenes and how could a scene meaningfully change when you come back to it. And not all of the repeat visits ended up, but some of them did end up becoming kind of the backbone of the structure of it. You do return to spaces and sometimes you return to spaces after much time has passed and you see them change a little bit. And so I think that was more the evolution. Yeah, just little prototypes. What does repeat visits to these spaces look like? And then, like, what are the connections we can make between them?
[00:18:50.971] Samantha Gorman: There's a whole game worth of dogs and robots that didn't quite make it in, but, you know, someday.
[00:18:57.711] Kent Bye: And there also seem like little serendipitous paths that I would take, and then I would have an exit for each scene. Are there multiple ways that you can get out of that scene? Or is there some scenes where you have to solve the puzzle to get to specific points? I'm thinking specifically of I'm on a train, and eventually I go to the human. And I was like, oh, wow, everything totally disappeared. I'm stuck. But then it ended. So I don't know if I didn't do that, if there would be other ways of timing out, or if you really want to end the scene with some sort of action that's being taken.
[00:19:27.119] Danny Cannizzaro: It's scene by scene. So there are some scenes that everyone will end the exact way, but overall, most people will see most scenes, but the order they see them on, the path they take to them, will be pretty different per player. That train scene you mentioned, I think, can end three ways. You can be in that, the woman that you jump into on the train, and if you just wait there as her, eventually, going at the dark salado, this giant eye in the shape of, with axolotl tendrils, will show up on the train, sit next to you, and grab you and be like, keep moving. If you look out the window, depending on what scenes you've seen, you might see some bird window washers. And if you stare at them, you can jump into them and you go back to that bird lobby, but it's progressing time. If you look out the other window and there's clouds, you might see a face in the clouds. And if you stare at that face in the clouds, you'll jump straight into the face scene. A lot of the scenes also have potential deaths in them. There's lots of death, reincarnation, being re-put into different scenes. And so every time you die as a character, you get sent to the escalator space. And when you're on the escalator, you can choose to ride it up or you can choose to ride it down. If you ride it up, you're presented by this angelic creature rings of eyes with options of what you want to see next. If you ride it down, the axolotl creature just chooses for you and puts you into a scene.
[00:20:36.940] Kent Bye: It reminds me of Facade, the piece by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, where you have the ability to explore this possibility space, and then you can experiment around with it. And that's also a shorter experience where you want to play it again and again because you want to take different choices. And it feels like the type of experience where it could be a short form, but something that has high repeatability that maybe has the same length, or maybe not because there's a consistent story that you're telling that It's not really intended to be replayable. So I'm just curious how you start to think about the replayability of that as a potential further development of a project like this that is relatively short, which is great for a festival circuit. But when it goes out to a broader context, then audiences tend to want to have longer experiences.
[00:21:25.362] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, I do think, speaking of the short, we like short games, short experiences, and it is a tough market for those type of things, but we do think that they are valuable works and underrepresented works in the interactive games field especially. So we don't have plans to make this into a giant experience. When making a festival version, just because of festival scheduling, you need a more consistent like, oh, I'm pretty sure this is going to be over in 20 minutes so that the next person that shows up comes in. So we actually have in the code base a festival version defined that has a lot more kind of like, oh, if you explore too long in the scene, someone scoops you up and moves you along. Then we'll remove all those for whatever eventual public version it is to let people, if they want to just like linger and see all the little details, we're going to let them go at their own pace through it and be a little more exploratory. But we're still figuring out exactly how missable and what things that were half cut we're going to add in for the public version and how close it's going to be to the festival version.
[00:22:25.990] Samantha Gorman: Yeah, I think that's actually, I was really happy about, you know, the Stranger Things project and it was a really interesting experience to work on, but it was for like three years long. So I think for us, you know, it was really the appetite to make something like absurdist, but that also has a sort of like a gravity to it, you know, that can be like short and, you know, stay with people is something that definitely like craving to try writing on next.
[00:22:51.405] Kent Bye: And there's also an interesting context around the MetaQuest Pro headset as a headset, just because it's something that was created, pushing the technology forward. But in terms of its commercial success, it really wasn't commercially successful, which Meta was very liberal with making sure that other developers either got a hold of them. So there's a bunch of them that are out there. But it's also a very niche market in terms of the specifics on the meta ecosystem. But then you look at Apple Vision Pro, which also has eye tracking pretty much integrated. So I'm just curious, as you move forward, if you're thinking around, like, this is something that would be really targeting Apple Vision Pro or this sort of small set of meta Quest Pro users? Or if you expect over time that there'll be just more and more eye tracking technologies built into the core platform?
[00:23:37.714] Danny Cannizzaro: There's also an interesting thing with Vision Pro currently where at the app level, we as developers don't actually get access to where people are looking. So we couldn't bring this completely unchanged to it because for privacy concerns, Apple fully locks out developers from actually having any direct access to the vector that the eyes are pointing in. It does feel like one of the reasons we made this though is it feels like the next generation like wearables, AR glasses, headsets from everyone like eye tracking feels important in that and it feels like something that we're just at kind of the start of more and more things supporting. And so that was one of the reasons why we were like, oh, this is an interesting time to start exploring it while it still is new and green fields for experimentation. I do think the Apple Vision Pro UI, UX stuff works really well, better than I expected it to. And there's separation of where you're looking from actually that's not... The decision, the decision is like when you do the pinch. That is something that we mirror a little bit in this where you're looking around but then often there is like actions you do on a controller because the straight up using the eye info with nothing out is tricky. And so the other thing we have is that like eye contact being unique and then the timer when you look at things. But yeah, we're still experimenting with when it comes out, what is a playful version for headsets that can not have eye tracking, that do have to rely on head pointing. And so that's one of the things we're probably going to play around with, is having some type of fallback so that you can get a version of the experience, even on headsets without eye tracking. But that's like a whole little mini project we're going to do over the next couple months.
[00:25:28.877] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I remember the demo that I did at GDC that was, I was looking in a mirror, but when your eyes move, you kind of black out and it jumps. And so you can't actually see your eye move because you unconsciously shut everything out. And so when I saw your menu screen where you're looking around and the eyes are tracking it, I was like, ah, this is the demo that actually was able to give me that type of feedback of seeing the impact of the eyes as I'm moving around. But it was one of the more immersive eye-tracking moments that I've had. I'd love to hear any elaboration around that specific introduction, the first encounter of the eye gaze.
[00:26:06.386] Samantha Gorman: I think, Dani, it's best to talk about this. This is one of the later scenes that you made and added.
[00:26:11.661] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, we had a normal menu and I was like, no, this is the first thing you do. I need to spend it. I took a week and I just got into trying out different eye things. And it's a room full of eyes. And when you look at them, at first they just kind of look back at you and then they start looking towards the thing you're supposed to look at. And it's kind of like trying to be like, hey, over there a little bit. And if you pull the trigger while you're looking, I don't know if you did this, if you pull the trigger while you're looking at them, they kind of get poked in the eye. And so then they start getting suspicious of you. And so when you look at them, they start sweating and getting nervous. And eventually, if you keep poking them, they start hiding from you every time you look. So just trying to be playful, trying to have enough of them. There's like 400 sets of them around so that as you look around, you're constantly looking at one of them. One thing that we learned designing in general is... What looks good on the screen is very different when you're doing a lot of things that respond to eye tracking, you never see it in the off state. So for example, if you have a cursor that is drawing clouds over a scene and it looks beautiful where you're drawing, from watching a recorded video of it, your first person perspective is always that those clouds you're drawing are dead center in the screen and always on. And it's like not as pretty. And so it's like the screen recorded version of it is very different. If people look immediately at you, you don't notice them turning to look at you. If you have instantaneous feedback, like when you're looking at, by the time you're looking at someone, they're already looking right in your eyes. And so you have to add in these delays so you can perceive the action of looking back or the action of something going on. you don't actually need if you're seeing the cast version of it. Because the cast version of it, you're looking isn't causing the action. So there's a weird balancing of that throughout the project that was surprising.
[00:27:49.915] Kent Bye: Okay, that's really helpful to hear because it re-emphasizes the part of when you're looking, you're already there. So it was always difficult for me to detect my eye tracking, to actually say that this is working, unless it was a video.
[00:28:01.544] Danny Cannizzaro: The change has already happened. Yeah, the change has already happened, you don't notice it. And we perceive changes a lot more than we perceive the info about the state. You notice the state change of a character, of something.
[00:28:12.072] Kent Bye: Okay, so you had to implement a delay for people to actually perceive it.
[00:28:16.474] Danny Cannizzaro: A delay in that first scene that Samantha mentioned, the cowboy standoff scene, end up being, if you remember the dramatic hamster, inspired by that where we end up implementing these, they don't just look back at you, we try and have their bodies contort, I'm sorry, I just turned over, contort 180 over their shoulders to look back at you in these very dramatic poses. And it starts off with just the cowboys, but then it's the tumbleweeds, the rocks, the crows, the horses. everything, because you notice that change of them going to look at you more than you just notice the actual stare. It's not just eye contact, it's like the moment of eye contact that's important.
[00:28:53.652] Samantha Gorman: Yeah, I would just add that there's an escalator scene where you can go up and down, and to the clouds, we were like, oh, it'd be really beautiful if everywhere you look there's mist and tracking, and we're like, oh my god, this is so annoying, because it's obviously competing with the ability to make connection with the characters.
[00:29:13.926] Kent Bye: In terms of the overall story, you're creating these little vignettes and these prototypes, but there's a continuity between things that happen in one scene that lead to other scenes. And so I'm curious to hear around the narrative progression, because there is like a subtle arc that is there, but it's also like in the background in the sense that the interactions and the exploration, the agency, there's other experimental things of the absurdist nature that or more prominent to the story elements, but there is a story that's there. So I'm curious to hear that process of developing like an overall arc of a story that you wanted to tell in this piece.
[00:29:50.359] Samantha Gorman: Yeah, so there's actually a lot of different roots. And in the sewing together of those roots, I think that you can see where the shape of the narrative came from. So you have the mechanics that give inspiration, for instance, the elevator scene. However, there is actually a famous story about a man making eye contact with an axolotl from Julio Cortázar that we're big fans of. And essentially an older man goes into an aquarium and visits an axolotl over time until they become like almost symbiotic and a kind of switch almost consciousness and perspective and that was one of the triggers for imagining what these sort of entities or characters are because there's these sort of two balance These larger entities at each side of the progression, every time you're reincarnated or put into a different body that you can go and visit. And the symbol of the axolotl, in particular, that story as like a guide through sort of the afterlife or a sort of watcher is largely partially responsible for the emerging narrative of the entity that counteracts the Christian biblically accurate angel at the top and like how those entities work together where they're considered kind of bifurcated through most of the story as an either or binary choice. And then you realize you cannot go into other bodies without bringing parts of yourself with you. that in the end, you know, they kind of like merge into this one entity. And it's really like that momentum and progression and the encouragement to keep experiencing more and becoming more and more full of personality and perspectives of the world over time. That's the sort of like momentum or the climax of the piece.
[00:31:34.991] Danny Cannizzaro: I know, Samantha, you spent a lot of time on this very short amount of text. Like we wanted the text very short, but you still tried to keep the two characters distinct in tone. Do you want to talk about that?
[00:31:46.434] Samantha Gorman: Yeah, so the hardest scripts to write are sometimes the ones where it's like one word has to represent five different scenes, right? And the way that these two entities speak, they're both sort of higher status characters, and they're both like looking down at you. But there is a, I guess you could say a different accent or tonality to the voice. So in the Angel, you know, there's sort of like exalted, we're not using like thou and they. We want to stay away from that, but still get the kind of gravity of the feeling. It's a little bit more at a remove from you. It's amused. It's more observational. And then the axolotl feels very intentional in how it approaches you and how it wants you to experience more and go on into the next life. And it feels more like a catalyst or a guide. So that differentiation of the characters was intentionally made, but with trying to use as economy as language as possible.
[00:32:42.523] Danny Cannizzaro: And then I take some of that and with the rest of the art team we make the angels super ordered and then the axolotl creature is always not just alone but in a swarm of eyes and we try and make it organic in sound design and kind of emphasize some of those beats to like reinforce the script so that it's all kind of working together.
[00:33:01.072] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you're speaking about that story, I'm really reminded of the kind of surrealistic, absurdist dream logic type of structure of stories and how I feel like the dream logic works really well in the storytelling medium of VR, but there's also this paradox where it then becomes a little more obtuse or hidden or cryptic or you have to unpack these symbols or have to kind of puzzle it together. Like, often when you wake up from a dream, you're like, what does this dream mean? And then that can be like a whole communal process of even trying to, like, unpack those dynamics and through this fluency through the symbolic language that you have to learn how to speak and so I feel like this piece is starting to lean into that type of dream logic but also the symbolism because you know I wouldn't have been able to articulate everything you just said about this but you know as I go back and see it again there's another replayability factor beyond just the novelty of the mechanics and the experience There's other ways of puzzling the story together. So I'm wondering how you like balance that tension as a storyteller to kind of be leaning into this dream logic, but also at the same time, do it in a way that you maybe just trust people have their emotions and their experiences without having to ensure that they get each of the beats of the intention behind it.
[00:34:11.411] Samantha Gorman: Yeah, I think allegory is a really useful term and I guess technique here. These larger themes you can kind of sense. I think just the way that we're brought up to understand and view stories, you know that there's this academy of like choices and rebirth and, you know, going up and down and the sort of tension between these spaces. And then that tension is also at odds with sort of a playfulness and a kind of absurdism or like, oh, c'est la vie. The thing that I'm most engaged and hoping people come away with it is feeling like, oh, that was playful and spontaneous and surreal, but it also has a sort of thing that they're trying to name that's more allegorical, that's like a weight behind it. And you don't have to get all the symbols to understand that sentiment.
[00:35:04.198] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, and I think one of the other things we try and do is use some known things that players can latch onto as a guide rail. It's a balance of we don't want people to feel too lost. We want to be accessible. We want you to have fun, to use humor, to guide through that. And so if some people love unpacking deeper meanings, other people can just have a very experiential, superficial layer of it. But we try and use some of these known things. So, like, the first scene with the duel is an example of, like, it brings a lot of cultural connotation. You've seen cowboy movies. You know the standoff. You know there's this stare-down moment. And so you know that they're going to pull out guns. You know you're going to pull the trigger. And those were all, like, the actions you do of this. So we use the known cliche, but then we try and push it into a slightly unexpected way. So it becomes not just the cowboys looking at each other, but the whole world itself becomes a source of what you can jump into staring at each other. If you stare at the sun, you can see stuff. If you stare at the graves, the ghosts will come out and start waving back at you. It's just like... Using handholds for people to feel like they have just enough to make it through without getting discouraged or feeling like it's too much absurdity or surrealism. But yeah, letting there be room for interpretation.
[00:36:18.737] Kent Bye: Yeah, and in this piece, there's a lot of explorations of liminal spaces, of the in-between spaces, and kind of these Bardo states, and there's the metaphors of the afterlife and going up and down, the ascent to heaven and down into hell. There's different afterlife spatial metaphors, but in terms of liminality and this in-betweenness of the space, it feels like that's part inspiration of being in a place that is in-between, and you're in transit, You're not quite there. So I'd love to hear any explorations of this liminality that you're also exploring in this piece of face jumping.
[00:36:52.202] Samantha Gorman: I think our whole studio is very interested in liminal spaces, and you can see that sometimes throughout our work. And also in real life, we're very interested as artists in liminal spaces of airports and waiting rooms and the sort of place of passing through or transition as a metaphor for how you progress through life, which is probably a really interesting connection to make in the game. and that's why, you know, there's the waiting room, there's trains, and then there's even like an escalator, you know, when you're going up or down or through a space, you're just kind of waiting to be taken to one place to the other. The elevator. Yeah. What's that?
[00:37:35.333] Danny Cannizzaro: Oh yeah, I was just saying the elevator, a lot of the spaces are these spaces where you might be making eye contact with someone you don't know. Like most of the people that are making eye contact with each other are not like super intimate with one another, but they're either strangers or different species, object to person or person or dog to robot. So yeah, I think...
[00:37:57.264] Samantha Gorman: It's fellow entities passing ships in the night that you're all merged with in the end.
[00:38:02.790] Danny Cannizzaro: We know about Eager Little Fingers. So we've had a long-running dream project that we want to do and we still will probably do at some point called Eager Little Fingers that is about moments of connections and attempted understanding mostly between humans and animals and looking the way that we interact with other species of the world and also projecting that a little bit into the way that like AIs and other entities and intelligences like might interact with us and so that shows up in VVR where AIs are like hiring humans to do artisanal human labor that shows up in this where you have like dogs and delivery robots squared off against one another or just these beats of attempted or failed or the impossibility of knowing another, but the continuous celebrated attempt to try and know another. And so I think that is a recurrent thing through a lot of our projects.
[00:38:58.554] Kent Bye: Yeah, and this kind of liminal space is an emerging genre, both in video games and I think especially in VR, it works particularly well. So I think there's kind of like a way in which that this is tapping into this deeper aspects that I think are very much fitting into the narrative that you're telling.
[00:39:13.968] Danny Cannizzaro: Some of that might be like Uncanny Valley style thing where it's like, and this is, again, with Virtual Virtue, how do we play with the idea? It's like when VR first came out, there was all this talk about it's like you're really there. And it's like almost this promise of being able to truly be another or see another or walk in other shoes or go somewhere else or travel without traveling. But it's never a embodied, real version of it. It always is the liminal kind of like... unreal version of it and so I think that is one of the reasons why it suits itself so well for these spaces that something feels just slightly off on it like inherently you are not there as a person you're only having some of your senses replicating it and so it's like no matter how photoreal it is it's going to be this liminal version of that thing and so we lean into that and yeah I think the medium leans into that.
[00:40:03.130] Kent Bye: Just as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality, spatial computing, all these new emerging technologies, specifically around immersive storytelling and what they might be able to enable.
[00:40:15.751] Samantha Gorman: Yeah, for a while I felt like everything is sort of, I guess you could say, mixing into a soup of a vocabulary of a general spatial computing. And like it's less about specific like, oh, this technology or this headset, but more of a paradigm of how we interact, understand and see the world. And in particular, like each other. And I feel like... The main thing is it's sort of building towards another sense of the world, whether it's information or overlays or like augmented senses, I guess you could say, is how I feel about the future in a poetic way.
[00:40:54.787] Danny Cannizzaro: I've been working with Samantha for a long time, so we share similar thoughts on this, but I think my interest in working in this space continues to be not on the hardware of today, but the idea that the interactions and ways in which we interact spatially and off the page with the computer is being defined by the works in this space today. that the digital will not always be confined to flat screens and it's an exciting time as an artist to be able to have input and to try and expand the way in which people are interacting with the digital and the types of things that people could be doing with the digital.
[00:41:37.830] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:41:42.705] Samantha Gorman: No, thanks so much for talking with us. And yeah, it's really great to have face jumping experience for the first time here and see how folks are reacting to it.
[00:41:53.444] Danny Cannizzaro: Yeah, thank you.
[00:41:54.725] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it's great to see you in competition at a film festival. I know that you've been in and around these spaces for a long time, but a lot of projects you've been producing have been released on the store. So yeah, it's just really great to have a chance to see what you are producing in this kind of short-form narrative context and always pushing the edge of what's possible in the medium. And yeah, it's certainly one of my favorite pieces here this year, and I'm really looking forward for more people to be able to see the magic of face jumping. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:42:22.677] Samantha Gorman: Thank you. Appreciate it.
[00:42:24.700] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And there is a lot that's happening in the world today. And the one place that I find solace is in stories, whether that's a great movie, a documentary, or immersive storytelling. And I love going to these different conferences and festivals and seeing all the different work and talking to all the different artists and sharing that with the community. Because I think there's just so much to be learned from listening to someone's process to hear about what they want to tell a story about. And even if you don't have a chance to see it, just to have the opportunity to hear about a project that you might have missed or to learn about it. And so this is a part of my own creative process of capturing these stories and sharing it with a larger community. And if you find that valuable and want to sustain this oral history project that I've been doing for the last decade, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Every amount does indeed help sustain the work that I'm doing here, even if it's just $5 a month. That goes a long way for allowing me to continue to make these trips and to to ensure that I can see as much of the work as I can and to talk to as many of the artists as I can and to share that with the larger community. So you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
