My first time in Connectome I spent nearly an hour just calmly connecting the dots and making quiet discoveries to reveal hidden shapes in the space around me.
Developer Grant Hinkson describes the project as “an immersive art experience” rather than a game and I hosted him on the Good VR Podcast to discuss the unusually meditative work.
“I started with feeling words — discovery, joy, moments of awe. In the very beginning I wasn’t even sure what I was going to create,” Hinkson says. “I just knew those emotions that I wanted to elicit.”
First released as a hand tracking experience on Quest, Hinkson updated the project for the higher resolution Vision Pro as well as Apple’s gaze-pinch interface. The result is a completely laid back experience where you look around to slowly reveal the geometry of simple hidden objects.
“What if there were just floating points of hidden objects floating in space and the way you reveal them is by scanning the space with your hand or looking with your eye?” And then there’s some visual reaction that you found something, and then just by a simple pinch, you reveal it,” Hinkson said. “So like that’s the moment of discovery. And it it was anchored to this familiar childhood game of connect the dots. Everybody gets that idea. There are points and we connect them and something is then created.”
A 7-minute audio story covers Hinkson’s design and inspirations for Connectome available to free subscribers and syndicated out to all platforms while paid subscribers can access at 34-minute discussion on the Good Virtual Reality substack.
Connectome is available on the Quest Store for Quest 2 and 3 as well as the App Store for Vision Pro.
