Merge Point

An intergalactic zoo train has crashed on an alien planet and the animals are loose. One player is on the planet in VR, on a Quest 3. The others are on phones in the real room, looking into that world through a passthrough portal window that the VR player carries and positions. The VR player has to keep the animals fed, keep the carnivores away from the herbivores, and repair the train; the phone players have the materials to do it with.

The interaction design is a split of abilities across devices. The VR player teleports by raycast, grabs with the controller, sees a hunger bar over each animal and a red highlight on damaged train parts, and fits a part where a green highlight shows it belongs. A phone player taps to pick up the train parts floating around their room, swipes them through the portal, and makes food by opening a whiteboard, choosing the hungry animal, and tracing a dotted sketch of what it eats — a steak for the lion — before tapping Create to turn it into a 3D object. Nothing tells either side what the other needs except talking: the scene table’s entry for that step reads “speaking out loud. use your mouth and ears”. The train fixed is a win; hunger run out and more than one animal eaten is a loss.

I worked on the multiplayer system meant to put the headset and the phone in one synced space — the part every other mechanic depends on, since the portal is only a window if both devices agree where things are. By the team’s own account in the design document, a running cross-platform prototype was not finished in time for proof-of-concept testing, so what is here is the design: the scene-by-scene interaction table, the colour explorations and the phone and TV interface screens.