Summer Creatures
Spaces · Expo 360° · 2020
What does a virtual nature look like when you can't go outside?
This is a small Eden made during 2020, when going outside was a complicated word. A pond, an orchard, granite warming in the sun. Living there: a handful of plastic creatures, the kind you'd find in a beach toy bin. They float, they sit on the rocks, they don't really do anything. You can walk in through a headset, or pull up your phone and meet one on your living room floor.
Brief
Expo 360° commissioned the work during lockdown, with Alejandro Gandarillas advising. The premise was simple: build a place. Something you could put on your head and walk into when the outside was off-limits. The creatures, plastic and bright, made the world feel less like a simulation of nature and more like something handmade.
Process
The landscape was pushed toward photorealism. Granite, water, grass, light, rendered with the care a postcard takes using Twinmotion and Unreal. The creatures took the opposite path. They were sculpted clay-style in ZBrush and Blender, then finished in glossy plastic. Star-shaped bodies, little horns and spikes, the bright primary colors of pool toys. The VR runs in the browser through WebXR, so it works on a headset or on a phone with motion tracking. No installs. At the expo, you scanned a QR code and walked in from wherever you happened to be standing.
The creatures sit there shiny and obvious in a place that's putting genuine effort into believability, and that mismatch is the point.
At the expo, the world came in two layers. The full VR experience, opened with a QR code on a headset or phone, and a Spark AR filter that let one of the creatures show up in the room with you. Point your camera at the floor. There it is, on your carpet, a plastic thing the color of a pool toy, standing very still. It was a way to send a piece of the world home with you.
