HyperBody

HyperBody is an experimental open-world VR game space with six levels: Pinkray, Seventeen/Sixty-One, Vampire Squid, Stratholme.GoStop, Typhoon Lionrock and Garden Portal. You explore its trance-like worlds using basic movements such as walking, flying, rotating and touching, and look for shining eye-shaped portals that lead to new levels. The experiment encourages you to use your whole body to explore and consider the space’s aesthetics, movement and overall feel.

Six levels

Pinkray explores queer “tuning” through vidding, shipping, interviews and architectural mods, presenting an emerging game fandom. It includes non-collision NPCs, architectural ruins, visual novels with 3D animated text and NPC dialogue. Seventeen/Sixty-One, co-created through research and interviews with Chinese science fiction writer Tang Fei, presents an alternative vision of queerness, femininity and technology in Chinese science fiction. It combines 2D illustrations, animations and 3D text as interactive paths, alongside soundscapes and atmospheric objects.

Vampire Squid takes inspiration from Vilem Flusser’s book of the same name. You explore multiple worlds made by remixing 3D scans of spaces, cartographies and surfaces from London and Berlin. This spatial autoethnographic archive draws on Flusser’s ideas about skin, space and sexuality, and includes non-collision scanned architectural ruins on a cosmic scale and surreal NPCs.

Stratholme.GoStop combines physical and virtual elements inspired by a short novel by the creator’s childhood friend, Boxiao. It brings together modding and crossover elements from a Chinese post-industrial ordnance factory welfare zone and the Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne universe, with visual novels based on dodecahedron objects and 3D-scanned Chinese urban ruins.

Typhoon Lionrock speculates on movement, direction, scale and sound in VR spaces. The level is described as very difficult and pays tribute to time spent at the Run Run Shaw Library at City University of Hong Kong. Its multiple abstract scenes reference Hong Kong, Dunhuang and Chongqing.

Garden Portal draws on Chinese immortality cultivation. You explore a non-linear audiovisual space with intentionally incomplete and imperfect sound and architectural design. It contains NPCs to find and touch, hidden tokens and architectural ruins.