I rebuilt it for my dad's birthday

The best part of PolyFish isn’t the fish. It’s the voice.

When I first built it, back in 2014, I was a brand new dad, and we had just moved to Texas to be closer to the grandparents. My own dad has been a radio guy his whole career: morning shows, award-winning character work in commercials, the kind of person who can make a thirty-second ad sound like it means something. So PolyFish quietly turned into something better than a tech demo. It turned into an excuse to work together.

I wrote him a script, and I wrote it deliberately cheesy, overblown nature-documentary narration for a tank of low-poly fish that had not remotely earned that kind of gravity. And he read it perfectly. Dead straight, warm, a little tongue in cheek, that cheesy-sweet delivery only he can do. His voice is the thing that turned a physics toy into a tiny documentary that knows it’s ridiculous and loves the fish anyway.

I showed it on a headset at a VR meetup in Austin, and people stopped and watched. But this was before anybody had a VR headset at home. No matter how well it played in a room, there was no way to hand it to someone to keep. So it went in a drawer, with his voice on it, and it sat there for the better part of a decade.

What finally pulled it back out was his birthday. I wanted to give him something, and the something I already had was this: a little ocean he had narrated a dozen years ago that almost nobody ever got to see. So the gift became the work. I rebuilt the whole thing to run in a browser, on a phone, in a headset, from a single link. Back in 2014 he did his part. This time the part was mine.

Now I can send him a link, and he can open the thing we made together, on his phone, on his birthday, and hear himself narrating a sea full of fish that are still, after all these years, busy living and dying right on cue.

Open PolyFish on the live site ↗