Walkabout Virtual Reality Game Invites a Pause while Still in Play

Mighty Coconut, an Austin, TX-based animation studio, developed a beloved virtual reality Mini Golf experience that has the likes of Jim Henson Company knocking on their door. They just released a Labyrinth course! If you’ve never tried VR, get ready to be mesmerized.

The visionaries and creatives (and really kind people - definitely, Brighter Beings!) behind the scenes at Walkabout Mini Golf have created a mindful and gorgeous putt-putting experience that delights hundreds of thousands of people across the globe daily.

To offer a new way for players to enjoy the digital environment, connect with one another, and tap into the meditative power of their putting greens, the Walkabout team invited LumenKind to play together! We begin our journey in Shangri-La with a curated intention and guided mindfulness experience for players to enjoy within the game. The suggested intention is CENTER, “I trust myself.”

In addition, their designers have offered to share more depth about their inside story of how they create these mind-bending environments. With our collaboration, their community (and you!) can learn mindfulness tips and perspectives from their award-winning artists (these include some of the minds behind your favorite Disney movies!).

Mighty Coconut senior art director Don Carson shares his reflections on the themes of mindfulness and trusting oneself when collaboratively creating a place like Walkabout Mini Golf: Shangri-La.

How do you stay mindful when creating a virtual experience? My role as an artist means I am often tapping into my own reservoir of images and ideas when it comes to designing both places and the objects that populate them. The best work often comes from my willingness to get out of my own way and allow those ideas and impressions to come organically. Stress and worry can step on the hose of inspiration so nothing comes out, lifting of the foot allows ideas flow more freely.

mindful virtual reality learning to trust yourself LumenKind x Walkabout

What does it mean to trust yourself when creating VR places for others to discover? As I have gotten older I have come to realize that art creation and virtual placemaking is a lot like dowsing for water. You begin to trust when something “just feels right”. Whether you are designing an environment or placing a tea cup on a table you plumb your own intuition to “know” when each element is placed in the perfect spot. Over time you release the need to know if it is right and allow the fact that it felt correct and hope that the collective choices made along the way will equal to a good experience for the players in our virtual environment.

To what extent do you put your trust in the players of Walkabout Mini Golf to add their own perspectives to the experiences? you help create? When designing themed environments, especially in VR, we trust in our player’s inner knowledge of how to interact with physical spaces. We all have the ability to relate to objects and environments based on a lifetime of doing so in our daily world. As designers we depend on this and trust that our players will come to the desired conclusions by following the designed bread crumbs we have laid out for them. We also need to trust that whether they do or do not comprehend the story we are trying to tell that they are ultimately the creators of their own experience and they get to decide what is and is not of interest and value as they explore the worlds we have created for them.

Users enjoy the themed courses for solo play, family members and friends coming together to tee up and catch up, and groups meeting for the first time to enjoy the scenery and practice their aim. LumenKind and Mighty Coconut are looking forward to exploring the frontier of virtual reality and mindfulness together.

Also in Our Journey

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Bulletproof Founder and Biohacker Dave Asprey makes Upgrade Pack

"It's a way to talk to the irrational unconscious parts of your mind to tell them to wake up and behave themselves! So you take one of these little things and you put it on your wrist, you put it somewhere like that and every time you see it your eyes which are not used to seeing on your skin go "what is that?" But you already know what it is and you connect with whatever it is you told yourself. It causes you to hit your subconscious and your unconscious mind with that over and over and over." (ref: @dave.asprey and @biohacked)