Tenderclaws debuted their first piece in competition at SXSW with a short called FACE JUMPING, which was a surreal, seemingly open world experience with a number of interactive experiments leveraging eye tracking in novel ways. Tenderclaws has consistently pushed the edges of locomotion in everyone of their interactive narratives, and FACE JUMPING is no exception. If you lock eyes with another character for long enough, and you'll have an opportunity to swap perspectives with them, which allows you to progress through various different vignettes. There's a deeply poetic story that's unfolding, but I found that I needed a lot of decoding of the dream logic, metaphors, and allegories within my conversation with Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro. But it's the type of experience that I wanted to play again and again to continue to explore this world, and all of the novel eye tracking experiments that I missed. FACE JUMPING was my second favorite piece of the festival, and it ended up winning the Audience Award for the SXSW XR Experience Competition, and it was also one of the hottest tickets during the festival.

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Music: Fatality