Tender Claws, the studio behind Stranger Things VR (2024) and Virtual Virtual Reality (2017), announced they’re debuting another patently weird VR experience at SXSW this week, which is all about swapping perspectives by making eye contact.
The VR experience, called Face Jumping, certainly sounds like another one of Tender Claws’ wildly inventive experiments into virtual reality, as it’s debuting alongside a host of others in the XR Experience Exhibition at SXSW’s Fairmont location next week.
The 30-minute experience is slated to serve up eye-tracked interactions that lets the player change perspectives by making eye contact with characters, animals, and objects. The studio says Face Jumping invites players to “reflect on the act of seeing and being seen, evoking questions about perception, consciousness, and how we connect to others through a glance.”
While most recently known for developing Stranger Things VR, the LA-based studio was also behind the mind-bending theatrical experience The Under Presents (2019), which included live performers interacting with at-home users.
It calls Face Jumping “a return to Tender Claws’ roots in experimental storytelling, multi-layered narratives, and absurdist explorations of technology and human connection.”
Tender Claws hasn’t revealed whether it’s releasing Face Jumping beyond the experience’s debut at SXSW, which will be open to badge holders on March 9th – 11th in Austin, Texas.
Since it primarily makes use of eye-tracking, it could hypothetically come to any number of platforms, including Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest Pro, and PSVR 2. We’ve reached out to the studio to clarify this, and will update this piece when/if we know more.
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