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The Cave was where a participant started their experience, with a prerecorded intro from the Voice of the Goddess eerily speaking from a location spatialized within their own head. Initially disembodied, the participants could only assume a body by walking close enough to one of the four Critters who call to them with snippets of pre-recorded boasts and enticements, while the surrounding air whispered story seeds and place descriptions peculiar to the Cave World. Once embodied as a Critter, the Portal and the Voiceholders would appear, and the participant could exit from the Cave to the other Worlds through a Portal , or record snippets of speech in the Voiceholders.
The cave was modeled after a real cave near the town of Banff, where a hot spring bubbled out of the side of a nmountain, leaving sulphurous smells as it flowed out of the cave opening and down through the pine trees. We spent some time there with the Precipice Theatre Company, with them swimming about in the pool role-playing the critters and participants... and while we were doing so, some strangers came by - including one man with some drums, who began a vigorous drumming! We never did find out what they thought we were doing - a common problem when we were out and about with members of the Precipice Theatre Company.
Since the cave was primarily an auditory experience, it was modeled and rendered most simply, without texture-mapping, just tiled polygons with dark colors, so that machine cycles could be devoted to supporting an extremely rich auditory environment - although you can see some of what the participants saw there in these
Cave World VR framegrabs
