John Bruneau
Artist, Educator, Curator, Coder.Download Resume | Full CV
Contact: john [at] artfail [dot] com
Teaching: Extended Reality and Interactive Technologies at the University of Southern California Iovine and Young Academy
Creating: Medical VR games for the Stanford Chariot Program and 360 video documentaries at Heart Street
Playing: Catan, Rain World, SimCity
Reading: About iSO dev
Hacking: Apple Vision Pro, Wiimotes, Arduinos
Recent Work
Out For Delivery, 2020-2025 [Heart Street]
Out For Delivery is a 42 minute playable documentary shot with a 360-degree camera. The slice-of-life experience follows a food delivery courier in Beijing on January 23, 2020, the day before Lunar New Year, and the day Wuhan shut down due to COVID-19.
Exhibitions
Awards
Bibliography & Press
Kinfolk, 2021 [Pariah Interactive]
Kinfolk by Movers & Shakers, is an augmented reality archive of Black and Brown stories that are often overlooked by our country's monuments, schools, and history books. Using Kinfolk, a player can place AR monuments in realspace and unlock their biographies and other learning resources. I worked as a senior developer on the project as part of Pariah Interactive.
Exhibitions
Awards
Press
Spaceburgers 2, 2021-2025 [Invincikids, Mighty Immersion]
Spaceburgers 2 is a physical therapy and procedural support game developed for Invincikids and Mighty Immersion. It is a fast-paced virtual reality game that combines the classic arcade racing and rail shooter genres. It uses a mobile VR headset and pedal bike alt-control interface. The faster the player pedals, the faster they shoot. Spaceburgers 2 was designed to motivate patients with limited motion or pain in their lower extremities to keep up with their movement exercises while they recover. This is part of a series of games designed along with doctors and researchers to create fun experiences that assist in physical therapy and pain rehab.
Bibliography & Press
The Banjo Toss, 2020
The Banjo Toss: Banjo Throwing Competition replicates in digital format the signature absurd contest of the Brooklyn Folk Festival, held annually on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, a federally designated superfund site. Players get 10 chances to rack up points by hurling the special throwing banjo as far as they can into the canal.
Press
DK BathTime, 2020-2024 [Bath-Time Bandits]
DK BathTime is a bathing simulator in which players must clean as much of DK as they possibly can. The more bubbles you scrub away, the more points you get. The scrub brush is controlled by a Wiimote attached to a real life brush peripheral. This game was inspired by Shigeru Miyamoto and the epiphany he had to create the original Donkey Kong game while taking a bath.
Exhibitions
Press
Red White & Blue, 2018
Red White & Blue is a game about bipartisan community building. It plays like a twin-stick action puzzle game with Atari-era aesthetics. The gameplay hints at a political narrative with an intentionally abstract design.
After over a year of development and some back and forth with the platform owners, the mobile version of Red White and Blue has been released on both iOS and Android.
Exhibitions
Future Flower, 2017 [Arbitrary Industries]
Future Flower is an ikebana inspired augmented reality game developed with Stefanie Franciotti. Players use their smartphones or iPads to create virtual flower arrangements in real space. Flowers can be moved, rotated, and scaled in multiple dimensions and on multiple axes using a small number of touch gestures. Players have the ability to find virtual flowers in the real world à la Pokémon Go but can also leave flowers and arrangements for other players to find and send arrangements to each other directly over email or text messaging. Future Flower is still an unreleased beta.