In FREE THE NIGHT, the liberation begins in the canyons at twilight, shadowed hills frame an iconic city view. We are able to pull up street lamps as if they are wildflowers and persuade lights out of buildings with a gesture of our hands. Each diminished light emits gorgeous embers that are a cross between fireflies and fireworks. These playful interactive embers swarm around us, as if to thank us, before returning to where they once lived as stars.

This VR interactive experience was created exclusively in 2017 for Microsoft to promote their launch of Windows Mixed Reality Platform. The full immersive App was premiered both as a 5 minute In-Store demo experience and the long form was available in the WMR home. My team and I worked closely with Microsoft developers and stakeholders as they were finessing the final SDK. We pushed the boundaries by creating a low level custom particle system built from scratch in Unity, that ran completely on the GPU. This intelligent and multipurpose system allowed us to generate massive numbers of particles and assign behaviors and formation to specific moments in the timeline and interactivity. Particle controls included movement, destination, behavior, and reactivity. Each particle can visually change shape, tails, billboards, and color at any point in the interactive timeline.

FREE THE NIGHT premiered at the Future of Storytelling 2017 and was presented at Siggraph along with a published Abstract in 2020.

We hope to someday create a 2.0 multi-player version that is a collaborative musical and visual adventure.

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