Forager is a short immersive story that shows the four stages of development of a mushroom through a groundbreaking volumetric timelapse that takes place within a game engine. They had to innovate on automating their photogrammetry timelapse pipeline both in the capturing and rendering side, and they ultimately decided to go with a voxel-based approach for representing and optimizing these volumetric timelapse processes.

I had a chance to chat with Winslow-Porter, co-creator, producer, and creative director of Forager as well as Elie Zananiri, co-creator and technical director on the project about their creative process, the influence of creative coder communities, how mushroom inspire them, their epic mushroom-based installation, where to use audience interaction and where to dial it back, as well as their multi-sensory integrations with smells, wind haptics, and SubPac haptics.