The Aquatic Messenger

The Aquatic Messenger is a virtual reality experience created by a team of faculty and students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

Note: You need a Vive in order to run the Aquatic Messenger.

The project explores the life of microorganisms. There is an emphasis on free exploration - you can scale yourself freely and move around in the lake. There is also an emphasis on the beauty of the lake. While we are a small team, we really pushed to get close to a triple-A visual experience. 

It is still in development, but we'd love to test the project now and get your feedback. You'll have to bear with us a little with the controls - while we've done our best to make them intuitive, they aren't totally explained in the game as they have gone through many rapid iterations. 

How to play: The intro scene has limited controls and is designed to allow new players to get their bearings in VR. You can pick up creatures by touching them with the controller and holding the touchpad or the trigger. There is a key in this world to get to the main scenes - you'll have to find it yourself. 

In the main scenes one of your controllers can still pick things up, and the other one is now a teleporter. Use the touchpad to determine the distance of teleportation and click the touchpad to teleport.

You'll also have a submersible with some levers and a slider. You interface with these by picking them up with your non-teleporter hand. The levers will take you to other scenes, and there is a large slider below the scene displays that will change your scale. 

There are many interesting experiences you can have just by playing around in the world with these controls, but I'll leave finding them to you. Have fun!

Website: here

Credits: here

Please leave a comment! Did you find everything? Were the controls intuitive? Was there anything you wanted to do but couldn't? Did you find anything especially cool when exploring?