A tick knows three things: the smell of sweat, warmth, and the touch of skin. It can wait eighteen years for them. A dog reads a fire hydrant the way you read the morning paper. A bat builds a room out of echoes. All of them live on the same planet you do. None of them lives in your world.
In 1934 the biologist Jakob von Uexküll asked his readers to walk through a meadow and picture a soap bubble around every animal in it. Inside each bubble is that animal’s Umwelt: the slice of the world its senses let in. It’s one meadow. Each bubble holds a different part of it, and nobody gets the whole thing, us included.
In Other Worlds is a web series that spends three or four minutes at a time inside someone else’s bubble. It’s part nature documentary, part comedy, part essay. Every factual claim in it is true, and every invention is flagged.
Twelve episodes. Each one stands alone and can be watched cold, in any order. All of them run through the same four movements, and that repeat is what makes twelve separate shorts read as one series.
Eleven animals and, last, the one watching. The amount of science changes from episode to episode, so each one runs in one of four modes.
Each sense gets one look and one sound, used again in every episode on that sense: a thermal wash for heat, a sonar wireframe for echoes. Two renders carry the argument. In the grey-out, everything the animal can’t register fades to flat nothing. In the bloom, a channel it does have floods in. A cut between the two is the whole show in one edit.
Sound is half of it. The mix is binaural, and ultrasonic and infrasonic material is pitch-shifted into human range, so you can hear the bat’s clicks and the elephant’s rumble. Generated imagery is kept for the views no camera can take. Real macro and wildlife footage holds them to something true.
The idea comes from Ed Yong’s An Immense World (2022) and, behind it, Uexküll’s A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934). The science is free to use. Yong’s selection and framing are his, and a produced series that leans on them would need clearance from him and his publisher.