SOOTHING.SYSTEMS was an experiment I wanted to conduct combining game feel with embodied gameplay. It was motivated by a hackathon project for the Games and Playable Media department, where I learned to use MediaPipe to identify body parts in a web-browser. I used my prior p5.js knowledge, alongside a love for abstraction and tone.js synthesizer sounds to create a demo of what a physical meditation/yoga-adjacent web application might look like.

The game design itself was driven by insights from Juicy Rocks, Pente.io, and ORBIT, where game feel and web-technologies could quickly make an AR and embodied experience that leveraged more game-design specific concepts in an abstract space. I wanted to strip-down and remove a user's immediate perception of themselves, and provide game-like effects for their body interacting with the abstract world in their screen. While it is a tech demo, I initially imagined that it could grow into entire yoga or movement routines - focusing on the meditative aspect of the practice instead of making it purely physical.

Casey Shields took the system farther and integrated the game system with fractal generators, shifting the focus from matching body parts to targets to personal exploration of complex shape generation.