Blortasia is at once a dizzying maze, an abstract art piece, and a surreal exploration game for the HTC Vive, coasting you through a collection of living sculptures. The sculptures move, thrive, and contort all around you. Every strange shape is essentially unidentifiable—ripe to exploit the phenomenon of pareidolia, or seeing what you want to see (like in a Rorschach test). Fittingly, the blueish blobs can be depicted as alien lifeforms, animal shapes, or psychedelic clouds. In Blortasia, what you personally see is ambiguous, always up to personal interpretation. On January 5th, Blortasia will see its wide release on Steam for the HTC Vive.
When we talked to Academy Award-winning visual effects designer Kevin Mack in 2016, the head of Shape Space VR (the creators of Blortasia and the passive Samsung Gear VR experience Zen Parade), Mack noted how technology has always guided his personal work. And with VR, it’s enabled even further. “I’ve found for my own work that I try to hybridize many different processes to maintain an element of individual self-expression,” he said. Blortasia doesn’t wield a mere generative algorithm for its wonky sculptures, but a combination of things like that—from physical sculpting to procedural systems. And the result is Blortasia, the truly undefinable application from Shape Space VR. Or as its trailer bids, “a psychedelic sculpture park in the sky.”
Blortasia will be released on Steam for the HTC Vive for $4.99 on January 5th. You can watch its launch trailer below.
