I look into the chirping, beeping, glowing mouth of a deep cave. A jungle world. Something flies overhead, wings fluttering. A tall-legged beast walks carefully across a giant pond… and I see the reflection beneath. But I can also, I think, move through the reflection. I fall through. I’m in another world. Wait, where’s my golf ball?
An art collective called Meow Wolf makes psychedelic art installations that are immersive and interactive. I’ve checked them out before, but this time, I did it in my home office., in a VR headset, visiting an impossibly alien miniature golf course. You can visit, too, if you have a VR headset nearby.
Meow Wolf’s first VR venture has arrived as an add-on course for the popular game Walkabout Mini-Golf, and this world, while wondrous, is only big enough to accommodate the 18 holes. I’ve golfed in it, wandered through it, floated around it. It sounds like Meow Wolf. It looks like Meow Wolf. And when I’m in there, I’m carried back by memory cues to my trip to the collective’s Convergence Station in Denver, because the entire VR world here is inspired by a living alien forest experience inside that physical space, a place called Numina.
A virtual world made from a physical one
Walkabout Mini-Golf’s founders come from Disney Imagineering and immersive entertainment backgrounds, and the app’s add-on courses have been increasingly story-driven and expansive over the past year or so. There are courses based on Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Jules Verne novels and the video game Myst. Some current courses already toy with flipping gravity or playing with reality. Meow Wolf’s course goes beyond that into a magical, immersive experience. It’s the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based company’s first stepping stone on the path to finding ways its artist-collective process could apply to virtual experiences, too.
I’m not going to tell you too much about it, because just like immersive theater or Meow Wolf’s own experiences, it’s best enjoyed on your own terms. But I was stunned by the feel of the lighting, the scale of the space, and the calmly undulating living beings that lurked throughout and reminded me of the sculptures I saw in person at Convergence Station. The Walkabout game aesthetic features a lot of simple polygonal shapes, instead of aiming for realism, but for me the effect works like magical origami. Numina, in a headset, has the visual and audio essences in all corners that I loved in Meow Wolf’s real-world realm: it’s maximal, intertwining, whimsical and unresolved.
I wanted to experience everything. Luckily, in Walkabout you can also fly.
The course also reminds me of my love of weird gaming. It’s hard to get weirder than What the Golf, and at times Meow Wolf’s course has bits of that feel. However, this is less game, more art. Sure, I aimed to finish the course and get a good score, but the experience is more about the journey. I want to float around and just enjoy it again. It feels like an artifact, a VR souvenir of Meow Wolf’s multiverses. At Meow Wolf’s physical installations, I bought strange fortune-telling cards and guidebooks and mismatched socks from the gift shops, bringing them home like found fragments of another world. This game lives in my VR headset like that, too.
For Meow Wolf, it’s also clearly a calling card, and an invitation to come visit the IRL installations. Much like the VR app Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge is for Disney’s theme parks, Meow Wolf’s golf course is a way for people to get a taste of the real-life worlds for a lot less than the cost of a field trip and admission ticket (provided you already have a VR headset).
As I experienced the course’s design, I talked with Caity Kennedy, Lucas Martell and Don Carson about the VR collaboration. Kennedy is Meow Wolf’s co-founder and creative director. Martell is director and executive producer for Mighty Coconut, the makers of Walkabout Mini Golf. And Carson is Walkabout’s senior art director. We spoke earlier this year about the collaboration when it was announced, but now I was also curious about how the piece was created, and what it means for the future of immersive entertainment.
Creating virtual art from within
The Meow Wolf Walkabout mini-golf course isn’t an entirely new world. Instead, as mentioned, it’s adapted from the very real physical space called Numina, created by a community of artists inside Meow Wolf’s Denver installation, Convergence Station.
Numina is a living world, a sort of self-aware entity that interdimensionally materializes into Convergence Station, where visitors explore it and get lost in the process of wandering to other parts of the experience. It’s a centerpiece, a multistory rain-forest-like dream world full of hidden rooms and beautiful walkways.
In the Walkabout game add-on, the Meow Wolf golf holes appear in a virtual Numina, which includes some familiar structures and audiovisual details but is also its own experience. That’s by design. According to Kennedy, Numina is a multidimensional intelligence that can interface in different places.
“Most of the creatures in Numina mini golf are animated versions of features sculpted in the Denver Numina,” Kennedy said. “We were not trying to create something wholly new, because we just didn’t have the resources to put a bunch of people working together with Walkabout folks to come up with all new ideas.”
There are, however, animated beings in the game, something Meow Wolf doesn’t often do in its physical spaces, since they’d require complex animatronics or projections.
“We had all these limitations in our art that would be so much fun to break. Like having to accommodate hundreds of guests — you kind of need a floor, you have to have railings. Down … needs to be down,” Kennedy said. “Breaking those rules right away was the obvious first step. And then the second one was movement.”
Audio is mostly the same, though, and this is part of why the VR experience feels so much like an extension of Meow Wolf’s worlds. The collective’s installations have complex soundscapes that fill the spaces with depth and spatial effects. Walkabout adapted these soundscapes into VR.
Because Meow Wolf pretty much has “the full installation audio from the actual exhibit, we were able to essentially get the real audio and remix it and place things in a way that made the most sense for our game,” said Martell. “As soon as the audio came in, it was like, Oh, and now this feels real in a way that we haven’t gotten to experience with a couple of the other courses like that.”
There are structures in Meow Wolf’s mini-golf course that mirror structures from the company’s Denver installation, Convergence Station.
Virtual collaboration
Prior to the collaboration, there were many parallels between how the two teams worked. For example, the Meow Wolf course was designed using Gravity Sketch, an app that both Walkabout’s team and Meow Wolf’s Kennedy were already using.
“We leveraged Gravity Sketch a lot as our initial rough version as well as what we call ‘set decking,’ which is sort of dollhouse furniture arrangement that we do in there,” Carson, a former Disney Imagineer, said of the collaboration process. “Luckily, Caity was quite familiar with Gravity Sketch, so we could actually meet inside the course as it was growing.”
This virtual collaboration process is what interests me the most because it feels like a precursor of where we’ll all be going someday with collaborative tools in mixed reality. Despite the two teams being in different locations, they were able to work together in a VR room on the same level, simultaneously.
A sign of the process of future experiences?
Of course, I’m already wondering what Mighty Coconut’s work with Meow Wolf says about the future of what we’ll see in both VR and AR headsets, and even the process of design for everyday physical experiences. Kennedy is thinking about those things, too.
“Site-specific installation is where Meow Wolf started,” Kennedy said. “And we are limited now because we don’t live in the cities where we are going to build. In the headset, it kind of broke down that barrier of not being able to go, because it’s in your pocket. The installation is something you can take with you, even while it’s being built.”
The work done on this course could be a test run for how to make future collaborative art experiences.
Kennedy also sees this being an open doorway to pushing Meow Wolf’s installations beyond the physical. While the company has used VR as a design tool for some time, Meow Wolf is getting more of its people trained on it for use as a design tool, but also as a medium. This can allow Meow Wolf to build exhibits in VR, in the real world, or both, which means more people can experience its exhibits without traveling to them.
For myself, when I want to escape to magical worlds, I have several options. I can travel to an immersive real-world destination, like a Meow Wolf installation or a Disney theme park. I can see a show in New York. I can read a book, or play a video game. Or I can put on a VR headset. These experiences can be small and personal, or large scale. I love the massive immersion of a physical Meow Wolf world. But can that work in VR as well?
“Our brains don’t file physical encounters and virtual encounters in a different place,” Carson said. “And I think that that is sort of a hint at the potential of being able to blur those lines. If you have something as special as Numina, in Denver, and then you have Numina here, one can experience both of those things, and those two experiences could live together, in your imagination, in your mind.”
Carson sees that as the future. Though his colleagues in the world of theme parks believe VR might someday make physical theme parks obsolete, he doesn’t agree. Instead, he sees it as a complement to the physical experience — that you can have a virtual version of your theme park visit, to relive that real-world experience from home.
It’s a future I’ve already seen happening: in this Meow Wolf mini-golf course, in ILMxLab’s Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge VR game and in my virtual experiences connected with Burning Man.
While hardware like Apple’s imminent Vision Pro headset and Meta’s Quest 3 are accelerating the possibilities for immersion, they aren’t completely solving the creative collaboration question for immersive futures. I’m amazed that at Meow Wolf, individual artists can find a voice in the swirling chaos, while collaborative teams can also weave ideas on top of that. In some ways, we’re seeing pieces of that form with Walkabout’s kaleidoscope of mini-golf worlds. And if Meow Wolf is finding a starting point to build future collaborative spaces for artists in virtual realms, then the rest of us likely will too.
