Places
Your room is home.
Stay home or go places.
From the main menu on your left wrist, change where you are.
The main menu
Touch a place to go there
In the headset, everything saved would be wiped and the app would start afresh. Here, nothing is lost.
In the headset, the app would close now. Here, the fish stay.
Hints off: only this bead still explains itself.
Your room
Your living room is the aquarium
The app reads the room scan your Quest already has, so the fish stay inside your walls and swim around the sofa instead of through it. The water surface sits just under your ceiling as a gently rippling sheen, with a clear patch overhead where you look up through the water. Currents are laid around the room by themselves, shown as drifting specks, and the fish ride them.
The hollow
Your room, sunk into a reef
Choose it in your room and the water rises from the floor up. Your room becomes a pocket of rock on the seabed, exactly its shape: sand underfoot, your furniture turned to boulders, and the reef running on past the rim. Moved the sofa? Rescan the room from the main menu.
The coral reef
A sunlit reef, built to look photographic, halfway there
Scanned sand, eelgrass, rubble and real coral colonies, beside a cliff. The water fades and hazes colours as real water does, sunlight ripples across the sand where the sun reaches, and schools cast soft shadows, with thousands of fish overhead and a blacktip shark on patrol.
The sunlit grotto
A sea cave with a column of sunlight
A bell-shaped cave, 15 m deep. Sunlight falls through the opening onto pale sand, and schools flash silver as they cross it. Its limestone walls have ledges and alcoves, crusted with life where the light reaches. Giant trevally and tarpon hunt here, and every few minutes a tarpon rises through the opening to gulp air, leaving a ring of light.
The great turtles
Ride a giant through the open ocean
You stand in a garden of algae and barnacles on the shell of a 10 m sea turtle. A herd of giants, 5 to 15 m wide, swims alongside, and a 24 m pygmy blue whale travels with them, sometimes gliding close by, its eye following you. After a low warning hum the herd dives with its backs kept level: the surface rises away and the light deepens to blue. Turtles rise to breathe, their heads breaking the surface above you.
The coral grooves · New
A whole reef to wander
Long spurs of coral with sandy grooves running between them, one unbroken reef to teleport along, with passages and a cave to find. Emperor angelfish and yellow tangs live here, and a blacktip shark cruises the channels.
The main menu, in the headset
- PlacesAcross the middle. The one you are in wears a ring.
- RescanMoved the furniture? Scan again, from your room or the hollow.
- MusicThe tracks and the volumes.
- GuideWhat every button does.
- HintsThe speech bubbles, off and on.
- RestartAsks first, then wipes everything and starts afresh.
- ExitAsks first: Stay or Quit.
Windows and portals · In progress
Cut a window in your wall and look into another world
In your room, choose Window on the science gun’s palette, then draw on a wall, the ceiling or a piece of furniture, or frame one in mid-air with both hands. Beyond it, the place you chose is alive, right behind your wall. Up to eight windows can open at once.
- DrawPull the trigger, or pinch, and drag. Drag a corner to resize, an edge to move.
- OpenDraw a portal, or pull at a window’s glass to make it one.
- RemoveAim at a window and pull the trigger.
- PlacesChoose what every window shows.
- KeptWindows stay with your room.
Then let the fish through
Make it a portal, and fish really cross into your room, not missing a stroke, while a faint ring ripples where each one passes.
The living surface
Real waves, simulated live, lighting the sea floor
A wave simulation runs on the headset's graphics chip, and from the same waves it computes the dancing light on the sand and the flicker in the sunbeams. The sea's mood drifts over minutes, from glassy calm to a light breeze, and each place has its own sea, including a gentle one on your ceiling.
Sound and music
Every place sounds like itself
The water changes around you from place to place, and in the open ocean the whale’s calls carry from near and far. Each place has its own music, from five tracks made for the app, or you can pick a favourite.
- TracksThe radio bead in the main menu: the place’s own, or one of five.
- VolumeFive steps for the music, five for the water around you.