Digitize Yourself: Branching Interactive Story ‘Human Within’ Launches Today on Meta Quest

09.01.2025

These days, everyone lives at least part of their lives online—but what if you were trapped within the virtual world? That’s the premise of Human Within, which launches today on Meta Quest. It puts you in the shoes of cyber engineer Linh after her mind is trapped within the very technology she and her sister Nyla developed.

Human Within draws inspiration from a bunch of classic sci-fi stories, including movies like The Lawnmower Man and Transcendence—both of which are about people who get a little too close to technology. For Linh and Nyla, the idea of linking a human mind to a computer creates incredible potential to improve humanity, but the much more self-serving and dangerous applications are what excite their corporate bosses. While Linh is trapped in the machine, she’s able to use her connection to observe what’s happening outside, and her ability to tap into different computer systems allows her to uncover information and influence events.

Where Human Within stands apart is in the way it combines different elements to tell its story. It puts you into an immersive VR experience, combining 2D film, 3D graphics, 360-degree scenes, interactive elements, and Point Cloud environments to show both what Linh’s experience within the virtual world is like and what’s happening in the physical world.

You’ll also guide the narrative, making choices along the way that can change how the story unfolds. Your influence leads to one of five different endings for Linh, Nyla, and the world-changing technology they’ve created.

To celebrate the launch of Human Within, we sat down with Creative Director Avi Winkler of Signal Space Lab, Film Director Anne Weigel, and Film Producer Michael Geidel of Actrio Studio to talk about the ways the game makes use of different techniques and technologies to tell a unique, immersive story.

Human Within mixes together a lot of different approaches to gameplay and storytelling. What was the inspiration behind taking that approach? Was it challenging to implement all of them together?

Avi Winkler: It was very important for us to craft a story with a long-form narrative that keeps the user engaged. By switching between full live-action 360 scenes, internet space scenes that also incorporated live-action content, and the Point Cloud scenes, it kept the ongoing experience feeling fresh. We were also very careful not to have any one of these scene types be too short, as going too quickly from one to the other would be jarring and overwhelming for many users.

Anne Weigel: Shooting the live-action for this project was an ambitious and rewarding experience, as we had to account for all the different choices players could make. Shooting in 360 degrees brought unique challenges—you get to envision the scene in every direction, as the camera captures everything. It’s a very different approach from traditional filmmaking, and it forced us to rethink how we approached storytelling, from how scenes were staged to how every detail supports the player’s choices.

Signal Space Lab and Actrio Studio both have a lot of experience telling stories and making interactive experiences in VR. How did that experience inform Human Within?

Michael Geidel: With each project, we try to challenge ourselves and look for exciting new ways to get our audience engaged. When we did our first 360-degree film projects in the early days of VR, everybody was experimenting. We tried to see how our knowledge from traditional cinema could be applied to tell emotional stories in VR. Games offer active engagement and can create emotions that films hardly can, and our expertise in mechanics and player engagement was helpful. When we combined this with the experience of Signal Space Lab, we found novel approaches to tell the story of Human Within in a way that seems simple and effective for the audience to enjoy.

Winkler: Our 360 scenes and internet space scenes—with 2D footage of multiple screens before you, each one showing the events from a distinct camera perspective—consist of long takes lasting, in some cases, as long as five to six minutes without any cuts. The actors involved were incredible, becoming so immersed in the story and knowing and performing the content in a way that is more akin to stage play performances rather than film.

There are a lot of big, interesting questions about technology and humanity raised in the game. Can you talk about the story you’re trying to tell here and what you were looking to explore?

Winkler: Our goal was to tell a unique story about technology using technology. We also wanted to create an experience that incorporates the user as an active participant in the story. VR is a technology that can immerse players in ways that are otherwise not possible. A great deal of inspiration was taken from older movies such as Lawnmower Man, as well more recent films like Transcendence. And with a focus on technology, we wanted to explore the concept of ethical concerns behind technological advancements, especially at this time when things are being developed at an exponential rate with each passing year.

How do the choices players make work within the story, and how do they influence how the story plays out?

Winkler: Everyone in this world is unique and makes choices in their life based on a variety of circumstances. The choices in Human Within are based on selfish vs. compassionate options during flashback memories that determine how past events played out. It is the consolidation of these choices that have a direct influence on how the story ends. Depending on the combination of choices you make, you will get one of five possible endings that fall into the same selfish vs. compassionate theme.

Weigel: Players’ decisions don’t just affect the outcome of the story—they also define its past. Depending on the choice you make, the flashbacks differ significantly, altering the backstory you experience. This impacts the information you have as a player when making decisions and may also influence how you perceive the characters in the story.

Branching storytelling creates a lot of really interesting interactive elements, but it can be pretty difficult to implement. Can you talk about the challenges you faced there?

Winkler: I’m not a huge fan of choice gameplay mechanics that have little to no impact on the outcome of the story. While Human Within is a long-form interactive experience in the VR sense, it is not a 15- or 20-hour experience. Therefore, we had to be very selective regarding the choice opportunities in the story. As a result, the choices you make have a significant influence on which unique ending you get.

With the branching and different endings, how involved is Human Within’s script?

Winkler: The script is certainly large in comparison to that of a linear production, and the layout of the script in written form is very much like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. When it gets to a choice moment, the script tells the reader to skip ahead to a specific page to carry on. For those who are not accustomed to reading branching narrative scripts, it can take a little getting used to, but before long you are able to follow the story flow with ease. In addition to incorporating all of the details behind each of the different endings, as well as the variations based on the choice moments throughout the story, the Human Within script also had to go into great detail regarding what happens in each scene. The shooting schedule was tight and there were no opportunities for any reshoots, so every last detail had to be figured out and accounted for in the script writing phase.

You mentioned some great sci-fi stories like The Lawnmower Man and Transcendence as storytelling influences. What real-life tech and ideas interested you and helped inspire Human Within?

Winkler: I can’t say that one specific technology inspired Human Within, but technology can be both amazing and scary at the same time. Many advancements have certainly helped to speed up things, allowing for illnesses to be detected much earlier than before. But at the same time, we still have yet to discover the true impact that smartphones will have on us in the long run. There is good and bad in everything. The fictional technology in Human Within straddles the line between being unbelievably dangerous and profoundly helpful. Ultimately it comes down to how the technology is used.

Weigel: To better understand what the fictional technology in Human Within is capable of and how it might actually look, we delved deep into current research on brain-computer interfaces. This really helped us shape the world of the story from the filmmaking perspective. We wanted the technology to feel plausible but still leave room for imagination. The idea that the main character’s consciousness exists in a kind of digital limbo became a perfect way to explore the consequences of pushing innovation too far.

What are the puzzles and gameplay like in Human Within, and how do they fit with the storytelling?

Winkler: While the choices you make in the 360 flashback memories scenes define which of the five possible endings you will get, the puzzle gameplay mechanics serve to immerse the player in the story in the present-day events. At several points in the story, there is an obstacle that prevents a character from getting into a room or from being identified. With the fictional technology in Human Within, the player is able to access information and interact with the environment in ways that enable them to resolve these issues so the story can progress.

Did you have any particular influences when it comes to the gameplay? Are there any elements you saw in other games, or in VR experiences in particular, that you wanted to work with or try to expand on or improve?

Winkler: Our focus from the beginning was to create an experience that completely immerses the user as an active participant in the story. The use of live-action content allows the experience to feel authentic and grounded in reality to a degree that polygon characters and environments can’t provide—at least not yet. At its core, Human Within is a unique experience that showcases what could be possible with immersive interactive experiences in VR.

Is there anything else you want to talk about or think our readers should know?

Winkler: Human Within is designed to be accessible to a wider audience given the experience does not require users to physically move around, and while it can be played two-handed, it is also fully playable with either the right or left hand alone.

You can delve into the virtual world and shape the story of Human Within on Meta Quest today. It’s available on the Meta Horizon Store for $19.99 USD.