Watch Sony’s PlayStation VR social experiment captivate an audience of developers

It’s counterintuitive to think that covering your eyes and ears with a screen and speakers can lead to awesome interactions with your friends, but Sony has demonstrated that it’s true.

PlayStation VR engineers took the stage at the Game Developers Conference today to show off a multiplayer experiment built around social interactions. The company did a live demo where three people ran through a low-polygon world with toys, trampolines, and instruments to play with.

What was most impressive is that while the players’ avatars are rudimentary shapes, Sony was able to bring them to life with a handful of simple animations that accurately portrayed body language. The team responsible for this app mentioned it is still in the early testing phase, but it’s clear that these types of social interactions could fuel VR’s growth into a $30 billion business by 2020 like many analysts predict.

Check out the full demo below: