ACMI + RMIT Audience Lab: July 2026

Inspired by the 90s arcade and Bryce 3D aesthetics, Bob Rush is a 2-player cooperative platformer where you become the platform via motion-tracking cameras to escort Babelina, our lovely princess, through each of the five levels to find Bob, her lovely cat. You each occupy only within your respective area and must work together to go through a series of puzzles, collaborating, communicating, and interacting across the level. You and your fellow player will work together to become the platforms that will help Babelina and Bob reunite.

Bobarista is a cozy narrative simulation game where you craft bubble tea, guide heartfelt conversations, and play character-driven mini-games that explore mental wellbeing.

You overhear the elders talking about consuming your planet! How dare they, just because you aren't a fully grown eldritch horror yet, doesn't mean they can take your planet!

An interactive fiction game by Team Not Disappointment, talk to people, ghosts and animals and convince them to summon you to ‘Cure the World’. Be careful to not reveal your true plan for world domination, or they won’t summon you and the world will fall into the hands, or tentacles, of the elders.

Multiple characters to talk to, multiple endings to get, all in a cutesy but creepy package.

When was the last time your family was all together? Come with me on a sandbox-platformer journey through my memories. I'll walk you through my experience growing up in Venezuela, the context behind why we had to leave everything behind, and how we've rebuilt our lives somewhere new. Never forgetting our roots, always excited for where we'll go next.

COWNAPPING: The Game! is a fast-paced, motion-tracking game for 2–4 players. You must work together to pilot UFOs and abduct as many cows as possible in under a minute. Why? Because you’ll need to collect enough cow milk to power the trip back to your home planet. Move around in the active zone and activate the tractor beam the best you can to complete your mission. Good luck!

eDream Portal is an interactive installation that invites visitors to enter the artist’s dreams. Each dream becomes a simulated adventure, drawing on a public corpus of 20,000 dreams together with the artist’s personal archive. As visitors move through the work, certain interactions generate new dreams and produce pages for a book: a hybrid object shaped by AI models, the artist’s system, and the audience.

The Desert Garden mysteriously calls adventurers from around the world to uncover its secrets. Three players control three different elements of the world through motion camera (ZED 2i). Come one and all, let the winds fill the sails, the waters prove kind, and navigate the complex mechanics behind this mysterious city. Discover the legend of the Desert Garden or will our brave cartographers uncover the desolate corpse of an empty city; a city for no-one.

Here and There follows a girl’s journey of adapting to a new country, struggling with loneliness, homesickness, and language barriers. She tries her best to take care of herself, to meet with new people, but the silent nights still overwhelm her. Nonetheless, an unexpected connection reminds her that even in the most unfamiliar place, she is not truly alone.

Look at Me is an experimental 2D animation about a small square tempted by beauty, guided from hesitation into a growing and distorted desire, until it becomes fully absorbed and moves step by step toward self-destruction. Rather than depicting smoke realistically, the film transforms its rhythm, colour, layering, and flowing motion into an abstract visual experience. As the smoke drifts, gathers, surrounds, and presses forward, it becomes a visual force of attraction, temptation, and emotional tension. Through movement rather than dialogue, the project invites audiences to feel how beauty can seduce, consume, and quietly lead the self into collapse.

A game about pondering Synths. Build, take apart, customise, debug, and rewire modular synths to make music and spells. Explore the tangible joys of perusing magazines, ordering synths only to take them apart, and the hours of debugging that follows. Tracing wires from connection to connection and buying new synths in the vain hope they will fix your problem. (They will not). Make music using, and embrace the joy of working with, esoteric tools. Become a synth wizard.

Merri Creek Freeway presents the tenacious efforts of Melbourne’s north suburbs to protect, at the time, a polluted creek from a widely touted visionary transportation plan. A plan which remains influential to the city’s urban development nearly 60 years later.

The multimedia format reanimates the local history remembered mostly from disconnected archived news clippings, audio recordings, and even inflammatory posters, uniquely providing special attention to the emotional experience of those who lived through it.

Sunbound is an interactive puzzle installation that balances its miniature world under the weight of visitors. Inspired by 1940s marble labyrinths, using their own bodies, visitors may guide a rolling sheep through the alien terrain towards its end of their making, or embrace chaos to knock over and shake up chain reactions between the miniatures. With a motion-capture camera, movement of visitors becomes movement of carved stone statues sliding atop the encased world, their weights physically tipping it. Responsive audiovisuals replace the haptic response, and colors blooms in the restraints of style, awaiting encounters in public space.

Created by Nurobodi Labs, The Listening Table is a participatory voice game exploring how listening changes the way people use tone, timing, pitch and volume together. Four participants sit around a table with microphones and headphones, using simple prompt cards to guide how they listen, respond and adapt to one another in real time. The experiment invites players to notice how small vocal shifts can change the feeling of a group interaction. Audience participation and feedback will help guide Nurobodi’s future work with responsive voice technologies for conversation, creative collaboration and more attuned human-machine interaction.

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