HanaHana 花華

Factsheet

Developer:
HanaHana 花華
Based in Zurich, Switzerland

Founding date:
January 2017

Website:
hanahana.world

Press / Business contact:
info@hanahana.world

Social:
twitter.com/HanaHanaVR
facebook.com/HanaHanaVR

Platform:
PC / HTC Vive / Unity

Description

HanaHana 花華, the VR experience, takes the player in a harrowing and thrilling journey into the depths of their minds, bodies and senses: Imagine if Minecraft and Tilt Brush met in a Salvador Dalí painting. You are the first-person player of HanaHana 花華, the life-force in a surreal sandbox. Embodied in a swarm of molecules, you are granted the ability to teleport and to create. By teleporting you can explore anywhere. By creating you can sprout hands, grow chains of hands and construct anything you can imagine from this root component. Be part of this artistic journey, in which the community of players collectively create a new, hand-made metaverse.

History

HanaHana 花華 is an artistic VR experience By swiss artist Mélodie Mousset. An early prototype developed together with VR ingeneer Naem Baron was finished early 2017 for the « Unframed World" at HEK, in Basel Switzerland, the first large art exhibition dedicated to virtual reality . This initial prototype received critical acclaim and quickly got nomiations and prizes from international festivals and awards, such as “Best Interactivity” award at WVRF 2017 in Crans Montana, followed by “Best Artistic VR Experience” at Beijing VR Festival, a Golden Halo award for “best artistic achievement” and a silver Halo award in the category “Future” at VR days, Amsterdam. The artistic VR experience was also selected to be part of the SwissGame delegation at Gamescom, and was short listed by The Guardian as one of the nine most fascinating indie game this year. HanaHana 花華 got funding from Pro Helvetia, the swiss arts foundation to develop the experience further and increase the scope of the project with new exciting and innovative feature to blow your mind for 2018.

Inspiration

HanaHana 花華—Japanese meaning “blooming, flower“—takes its name and inspiration from the famous manga One Piece in which the character Nico Robin has the power to infinitely sprout and reproduce her own body parts on any surface thanks the magic of the Hana Hana no Mi “devil fruit.“ The VR technology, like the devil fruit, grants the player with the heroine’s powers and allows us to experience for ourselves how it feels to have these extraordinary abilities: the excitement, awe, fear and other emotional states raised by our presence in digital bodies. Surreal, weird and uncanny, HanaHana 花華 is an outgrowth of Mousset’s ongoing artistic exploration on the liminal space between technology and self.

Features

• Room scale VR
• First person view
• Collaborative sandbox metaverse
• Digital Happening
• Persistent world
• Poetic and creative journey
• Computer Generated Imagery