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Overview

Ultrasonic Hearing

In our first experience, we translate the ultrasonic hearing ability of bats. Bats use ultrasonic hearing to help them see the world better. Bats will emit a sound, and will listen to the echo that bounces back to them to determine where things are in the world.

Here, you have a bat which follows your controller, and you can make the bat call out to search for prey. The world will highlight in waves as the representative sound waves expand from the bat. Naturally, the prey will also be highlighted, so you can use these calls to figure out where you need to navigate the bat to.

Electrolocation

In this experience, you are a bee among a field of flowers. The bee is controlled using "airplane controls" from the player: you stretch out your hands and lean sideways to control the lift and direction that the bee moves.

Bees use electrolocation to find pollenating flowers, as the electric charge builds up in flowers as they are left alone by other bees. Therefore, you will see flowers grow more and more intense until a bee lands on it, clearing it of its charge. By using this "sight", bees can find flowers which have been neglected and are more likely to have more pollen remaining on them.

Infrasonic Hearing

In this final experience, we translate the infrasonic hearing ability of elephants. You help a lost elephant find its herd by listening to the infrasonic sounds caused by the movement of the herd in the far distance.

We use vibrations in the controller to represent these sounds. Elephants are able to use this power to find faraway objects, because it can distinguish between the different timings that the infrasonic sounds reach the different parts of the elephant's body. We emulate this by having the vibrations from the herd reach the different controllers at different times. Players can walk around the area and reach out their hands to feel the vibrations at different timings, and can triangulate where the herd is currently at.

We wanted the world to seem vast to make the journey more significant. To help achieve this, we have a decently large world for the animals to reside in. To expand on this world, we have the players teleport to different parts of this world and change their orientation, so that there is a wide variety of different places which the players can end up in.