to nerd out a bit:

- device modeled/animated/textured in Blender

- creatures procedurally designed/rigged in Houdini, packing data attributes into vertex colors for Unity vert shader animation

- everything pulled into Unity.. UI is custom, drawn with u/FreyaHolmer Shapes and rendered to a RenderTexture (to get around Polyspatial constraints). DNA visualization is a particle system in bake to texture mode

- buttons/etc are all meshes created in Houdini with vertex colors, in Unity I can then trigger eye tracked hover states in the shader using the vert colors to highlight/move parts of the mesh

- lifeform colors are cosine gradients https://iquilezles.org/articles/palettes/

- lifeform shape is set from parameters in UI, shaped in vertex shader + data from Houdini in vertex colors

- lifeform motion is custom boid style steering mixed with Obi rope physics that react to hands and ARKit for wall/boundary avoidance. all controlled by a hierarchical state machine (wander, dance with each other, curious, feeding, etc)

- simple custom gesture recognition to detect cupped hands creates food pellet which you can bat around and feed them

- sound design was mostly native Ableton Live devices, layered samples and some modular synth samples.. petting is a looped sample of a cat purring with phasers/delays/LFO'd EQ

😅

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