The pandemic has radically changed our habits, imposing various rules to prevent the spread of contagion.
If you are exhausted from social distancing, Universal Everything’s latest creation is definitely right for you.
“Emergence”, the title of their new project, is now available for free to everyone on the Steam VR platform.
The game immerses the player in a crowd of thousands of people, against a changing canvas that is in various places wonderful and intimidating, realistic and fantastic.

In “Emergence” you control a solitary and luminous avatar in the midst of a mass of autonomous strangers, each of whom reacts to their own movements. While your rhythm and directions influence others both as individuals and as a group, you essentially become the choreographer of the crowd.

The movements of the crowd are programmed to simulate intelligent behavior (including avoiding, following and imitating), reflecting the seemingly endless ways in which human beings act in group contexts. A well of light calls you, every time you reach the light, this landscape moves, along with its soundtrack, gravity, atmosphere, and mode of movement.

“Our work often describes human forms and abstract movements, using a single figure or a pair of figures,” comments studio founder Matt Pyke, “with today’s computer graphics technologies, however, we can expand the concept, choreographing the movements of an entire crowd. By programming each individual member to perform intelligent behaviors – such as avoiding, following, or camouflaging ourselves – we can stage elaborate models of human behavior on a large scale”.