Project Title: Bubble Connect
Project Subtitle: A pocket-sized underwater space for digital connection
Short Description: Bubble Connect lets every phone turn into a glowing bubble that drifts through a shared deep-sea space. When you nudge your bubble near other people, you merge, shine brighter, and the soundscape thickens.
Abstract:
Bubble Connect invites participants to explore how small gestures can create shared motion. By tilting their phones, participants move translucent bubbles across a dark ocean. When bubbles meet, they connect and drift together as a group; one person’s movement can gently guide the whole. Yet when a bubble moves too far or too fast, it drifts away — leaving the connection fragile but alive.
In this quiet sea, connection is not about recognition, but the simplest desire to connect with another — a reminder that even the faintest motion can reach another and make impact.
Images & Video:
The initial scene setup
Bubbles connected as a group, drifting upwards
Process – Design & Composition
I began the design by thinking of what digital presence means and how it differs itself from our physical presence. In reality, there are a lot of identities that could either make us wanting to connect to someone more or less likely. However, with digital presence and connection, we can experience the most fundamental desire as human being in an almost-nothingness to connect to each other.
Initial sketch
Bringing this thought, I first come up with something I initially named “Anonymous Bridge”, which focus more on playing with the more symbolic bridging line between two players. I also built the initial prototype around this idea, in which I visualized players in this forever-dancing particles. I then brought this stereotype to Leon. He gave me a few very useful feedback and suggestions.
Initial prototype
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Leon mentioned how from a user instinct perspective, users would assume if they were moving to a certain direction, but if the other user are moving at the same time, then the line could move in opposite direction, which could potentially make it a bit hard to adjust.
Leon also proposed a few way to improve the gameplay mechanism, such as making them into a digital Buzz Wire, or things fall down from top or other directions, so users have to dodge bad things and collect good things.
Moreover, he reminded me to be aware of the relatively small screen, since with its current size of each user particle now, it is not much space to move.
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Most of these ideas have been greatly considered in my refined project. Only not the gameplay one, because I understand that adding the gameplay part would definitely make the experience more attractive and engaging. However, as described above, I was trying to use this experience to create a somehow nothingness and go back to the simplest while internal reason for people to connect without being externally influenced by gameplay mechanism. Most importantly, I was feeling a bit limited on where I could draw inspiration from, since it was hard to directly use a search word to find relevant browser art projects, and Leon suggested me to be aware that we can be inspired from something that is totally irrelevant format-wise, but have a similar meaning metaphorically. Thus, I met the inspiration of seeing hand soap bubbles sliding and reuniting at the sink, leading me to the current refined project idea.