Rori's Garden

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  Rori closeup

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  Rori habitat

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Rori’s Garden brings users into a tranquil underwater world where a curious, intelligent, and shy octopus might become your new best friend. As stress and anxiety have increased and more people seek emotional support animals for everyday coping, this experience offers an accessible alternative without the costs, restrictions, or responsibilities of a real ESA.

Ocean environments evoke a slow sense of discovery and wonder, often felt while diving or snorkeling, and have been shown to reduce stress and promote feelings of calm and awe. Through Rori’s lifelike, inquisitive behaviors, users experience moments of joy and wonder while also developing empathy and awareness for sea creatures and the fragile ocean environments they live in.

Rori’s Garden enhances people’s daily lives by balancing soothing calm with playful discovery and a deeper connection to the ocean.

Origins

I met Andreas at a hackathon in May aboard the deep sea research ship OceanXplorer. The hackathon, organised by OceanX, brought together experts in immersive technologies and gaming who share a passion for the ocean, with the goal of exploring better ways to engage people with the plight of the sea.

Since then, we’ve continued tinkering with immersive concepts and entered this competition as a fun way to learn standalone Quest development. Andreas wanted to see how far he could push character physics on Quest using an octopus, and I wanted to see if I could create a believable underwater environment that truly feels submerged.

Bringing Rori to Life

To get to this high level of physical fidelity we relied on the Physics Control system in UE5. Comparable with something like Puppet Master for Unity, Physics Control lets you physicalize and mix animations with physical movement. But this was only possible in UE to our knowledge as Physics Control gives you quite deep access to setups that are not the usual ragdoll. As it is also not limited to bipedals like most of those systems, we could bring an octopus to live with procedural animations, physical reactions, damping and muscle strength. What is very special in this setup and different to most game setups is the way we move him through the scene.The main trick was parenting all his bones not in worldspace but under his own root so when the incoming animations are mixed with the physics it’s in the octopus space and moves with him. Instead of a movement component driving around the actor, we push the octopus with real physical forces including turning. So in this case his movement and our touching is not fighting but generating a real life experience, never seen before in VR.

And this was done in only a few days as a case study on how far we can go with gestures, hand interaction and a believable character that shows personality because of the technical setup. For just a sandbox you can already get a lot of joy out of it and even when testing we caught ourselves spending more time with the octopus than was needed to verify our changes. We had a bit of help from the programmer who wrote the system at epic, as Andreas who worked on the octopus rig was a former Epic employee who also did a tech talk about “how to pet a dog” at GDC 2023. The idea of the octopus is loosely inspired by that. But using the meta hands made this little experiment so much better than we could have imagined.

What’s Next

When we started a few weeks ago, we had no plans to develop this beyond the competition. Now we are both completely obsessed with Rori and preparing him for release into the wild. In just the past two days, we’ve had strong interest from ocean research companies interested in collaborating, and we are deeply committed to scientific accuracy and creating genuine, meaningful connections to the ocean. We believe this experience has real potential to bring small moments of daily happiness into people’s lives and give them a reason to put their headset on each day.

Our next steps are to expand the concept and explore what it truly means to create a living experience in VR. Rori needs to grow, learn, and react to his humans over time. Ignore him for a day or two and watch him ignore you in return. Don’t visit for a week and you might struggle to even find him when you submerge again.

Rori’s personality and relationship with viewers are everything, and we want to get this right before any release. After that we will introduce some friends. We want to apply this concept to a range of lovable sea creatures, each with its own habitat designed around the animal itself.

Built With

• unreal-engine