RAMify is an interactive experience, which combines AR and VR storytelling in order to explore the possible future of memory technologies. The player plays as a memory architect, currently tasked with an ethically complex job where they need to retrieve the lost memory of a dying woman’s son for her. Through fixing and exploring the woman’s memory pieces, the player would uncover the tragic truth and be faced with the dilemma of whether to reveal the real memory to the mother or not.
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RAMify is an interactive VR storytelling experience that revolves around futuristic technology for memory editing and removal. From written language to photography, human culture has long relied on external tools for storing personal and societal memory. With the ascent of digital culture and its capacity for seamless archiving, not only has the effectiveness of these tools increased but, as some scholars argue, the human behavioral default has shifted from forgetting to remembering. RAMify explores the possible consequences of embracing future advanced memory technologies.
The story of RAMify takes place in a cyberpunk society, where memory implants and memory retrieval technologies have become commonplace. The player plays as a memory architect working for the MindGen Corporation, currently tasked with fulfilling a dying woman’s last wish of recovering the memory of her long-lost son. In the course of gameplay, the player must face complex ethical questions about whether to preserve, alter or delete the memories, as they uncover the relationship between the mother and the son. RAMify’s narrative immersion is delivered through a combination of the Passthrough AR feature and VR to emphasize the likeliness of such scenarios occurring and create a higher level of immersion for the experience.
Though set within the convention of the futuristic cyberpunk genre, RAMify addresses already existing dilemmas around technology and memory. Within the interactive experience, the ability to navigate through an individual’s memory represents the possible future of memory externalization. Exploring both the positive and negative ramifications of hypothetical memory tech, it rejuvenates the concern of the cyberpunk genre in a distinctly contemporary setting, highlighting the choices we make when using our technologies in order to remember or forget.
Through showing the possible consequences that memory over-externalization would bring to individuals and society in the future era, my project would raise people’s awareness on remembering to forget, and therefore avoid the dystopian cyberpunk scenario that the lack of forgetting would forge.
Tags:#VRStorytelling#MemoryTechnology#Cyberpunk