Emptiness Play is an MR multiplayer experience in which sound and light are generated through play, and a public experiment that explores the questions: “What is creation?” and “Does a creative subject truly exist?”

Multiple participants stand in a shared physical space and, through MR devices, generate and share virtual objects, interacting with one another in real time. Each time a participant operates a trigger or button, objects with varying properties appear in the space. These objects fall, bounce, or remain suspended, colliding with bodies, surfaces, and other objects, producing sound and flickering light. Objects disappear over time or are removed by the participants’ own hands. The direction of gravity, physical behavior, and acoustics are modulated by participant input and probabilistic algorithms, making the outcome impossible to fully control. A gap persists between action and result, and that gap gives rise to chance, triggering unexpected resonances. No explicit goal is given; participants explore the possibilities of sound and light through improvised collaboration.

The conceptual foundation of this work draws on the Buddhist notion of emptiness (śūnyatā). Emptiness here means that no phenomenon possesses an inherent essence; rather, everything arises temporarily through the interrelation of conditions. Creative acts, too, are reconceived not as something that springs solely from within an individual author, but as events that emerge within the interplay of body, environment, system, and others. This work translates that recognition into the behavior of an interactive system, attempting to present it not as something to be read, but as something to be experienced through bodily perception.

The structure of this work reveals a self-similarity between play and the world. While participants’ actions give rise to diverse phenomena, that generation occurs within a framework of probability and constraint. Human creative acts, too, are a conditioned freedom, operating under the constraints of physical laws, cognition, environment, and relations with others. When participants recognize that their own creation is itself an event occurring within the system, the very premise of “I am creating” begins to waver.

This work is designed as an art game with no winning conditions or explicit objectives. It is also developed as an MR performance. Contemporary dancers bundai and Nakagawa Rion generate and manipulate objects through MR devices. Within the play of producing sound and light, their bodily movement transforms into dance, raising the question of whether creation emerges at all. In the final phase of each performance, audience members enter the MR space in an experience session, unsettling the boundary between observer and generator.

The work is built on Meta Quest 3 passthrough MR. Photon Fusion 2 and Meta Shared Spatial Anchors enable shared spatial experience, while probabilistic audio-visual generation algorithms respond to participant input. A prototype is already implemented, with the first public experiment planned for the first half of 2026. The system will be continuously updated based on the records of each experiment and participant responses.