Interactive Story
Angela Ying Neubauer
Rachel Mulqueen
Philipp Totschnig
Design Investigations
The world is set in a future where Earth has been rendered uninhabitable following climate collapse. Most of humanity fled to a distant planet, yet, a small population stayed behind. Remaining within an AI-controlled safe zone called the Quolocom, the rest of Earth was left under AI stewardship to be slowly rewilded.
Fifty years into life in this almost perfect bubble, a young woman named Ona stumbles upon evidence that the world beyond may not be as lifeless as she was led to believe. Torn between safety and the unknown, she must decide whether to risk everything for answers, and each choice she makes reshapes her journey.
Through layered worldbuilding, storyboarding and custom asset creation, we pieced together the visual language of the Quolocom. Some assets were hand drawn, some explored through AI image generation. The story is set and animated in Unreal Engine 4.26 with hyper-realistic assets from Quixel Bridge, while MetaHuman character animation brings Ona and the people around her to life. To animate the characters faces, I used Live Link Face motion capture, recording facial expressions onto the MetaHuman rig in real time.