Kinesics is a two-player online cooperative VR game where players need to cooperatively solve puzzles to advance. The players can see each other, but not hear each other. To solve these puzzles, non-verbal communication via hand, arm and head movements is key. Within this poetic, wordless cooperation, players grow closer to each other through paying close attention to each other and learning how to interpret the other player in order to make progress in the pursuit of being united. The setting is made extra engaging because the space the two players are in is Escherian. So sometimes you collaborate with somebody that is on a ceiling or wall. By doing this we create a multi-dimensional maze and exploit the possibilities VR has to provide a 360-degree field view of this space.
Kinesics is a project in collaboration with Monobanda. It is currently in development. Creative Industry Fund NL granted a realisation fund as part of the digital culture fund in The Netherlands.
Charades
You could view a first prototype of Kinesics at the A.Maze festival in Berlin, April 2019. This was a version of charades where the players needed to guess emotions.
From there we worked on other experiments on how do you synchronise body movement or coordinate body movement.
Switched Hands
At IndigoX in June 2019 we showed our second prototype. Here we let people needed to communicate with each other to navigate a maze. Each had their own maze, and they could see the other player by looking up in an inverted maze.. One of the extra challenges was that the hands and arms they saw in front of them were controlled by the other player. So the players needed to think about how to communicate, how to get attention, and how to watch and listen.
Body Animation
At the moment we are working on a third prototype. Here is a peek preview.
Other Experiments
Some early prototyping on Charades was done with students in Korea.
