joe bain

Goliath, a VR project I've been working on for ages, with the amazing people over at Anagram, finally got released the other week. It was also in the VR Expanded selection at the Venice Biennale, and while I was very sad not to be able to go, I was very excited to hear that we won the Grand Jury Prize! It was a really creative project, and as an exploration of schizophrenia and mental health, it feels like such a worthwhile subject too. It's great to see it getting recognised like this!

The launch trailer dropped recently too:

For the last 9 months or so I've been working on a fun city-builder game in VR. It's a game where pizzas can talk and you decorate your home with slippers and tophats. It's kind of silly but lots of fun and has an awesome announcement trailer.

Last summer I got the chance to collaborate with some amazing street performers, Suzie Ferguson, Ruxie Cantir, and Fergus Dunnet. We wanted to make an experience that used VR in an open setting, inviting members of the public to take part and guiding them through a short performance. We used matched costumes and VR puppetry to bring the game to life, and merge the VR world with the real world. The reaction from our test audience was amazing.

It was kind of spoiled (as so many things were) by the pandemic, but hopefully it will get a proper performance in the not-to-distant future.

I worked on this project with ISO Design for The Box, a new museum in Plymouth. I was passed the design from ISO and created 3 interactive touch screen apps in Unity. Each app represents a real book, or collection from the museum, and allows visitors to interact with and learn about documents that might be too fragile to touch physically. There was a strong emphasis on the physicality of the books and papers, so each page has momentum, and animation, so readers can get a real sense of the source material. Additional information, photos, videos, and text are overlaid on the books, to add context.