Rat Hunt Boogie is a single-player VR sandbox that lets players experience everyday space as a cat. Players hunt rats, knock objects from tables, operate a television, and explore the environment using their hands as virtual paws.
Interaction and implementation
- Paw-like locomotion, jumping, grabbing, and eating gestures using hand tracking.
- An interactive domestic environment with rats, appliances, movable objects, and spatial sound.
- Unity and Meta XR SDK for the VR experience, with Blender used for models and animation experiments.
- Graphics work covering lighting, reflections, water, grass, and experiments with fur.
Iteration and constraints
The original raycast-based locomotion was too slow, so the team redesigned it using an approach inspired by Gorilla Tag and adapted it to feline movement. Performance testing also led to a mix of baked and real-time lighting, fewer grass elements, and the removal of expensive animated fur.
The project extended the hand-tracking work begun in Black Hole Boogie toward a different question: how directly can human hand movement evoke the feeling of inhabiting an animal body?