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If you’ve been missing a crowd, this could be the answer: Universal Everything’s open world VR experience "Emergence" is now available free on Steam VR for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index headsets.

Emergence premiered to wide acclaim at Sundance Film Festival in 2019, offering a powerful and unique (even more so now) experience of a crowd, that is only possible with the latest graphics technology. “It’s immersive to say the least,” Coolhunting praised the experience, as did Flaunt, who called Emergence "Part art project, part philosophical video game.”

Participants take control of a glowing protagonist surrounded by a crowd of thousands that react to the character’s every movement, traversing through surreal backdrops that recall natural and manmade environments.

Emergence visualizes patterns of human behavior which enable exploration of the individual and the collective. The piece continues Universal Everything’s exploration into VR following "Inside the
Sound," a series of 360-degree audiovisual environments released at the end of 2018, as well as the studio’s ongoing investigation into the human form and movement in digital art.

A soundtrack by Simon Pyke amplifies the sense of mass human collaboration and uses layers of vocals sampled from remote field recordings. Universal Everything Founder Matt Pyke said, “Our work often depicts abstracted human forms and movements, using a single figure or a duet. With today’s graphics technology we can expand into choreographing an entire crowd. By programming each crowd member with intelligent behaviors—such as avoidance, following or mimicry—we can reveal elaborate patterns of human behavior at a huge scale.”

Play Emergence via Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1337820/Emergence/

Credits: Matt Pyke (creative direction), Chris Mullany (development), Simon Pyke (sound design), Greg Povey (senior producer)