Category: capstone2023

 
“HOMEMOH” is an immersive VR experience that transports participants into the intricate and nuanced world of the Chinese diaspora in Zimbabwe, offering a profound exploration of the racial experiences within this community. Through its innovative use of virtual reality and a non-linear narrative structure, HOMEMOH invites participants to delve into their own racial encounters, sparking introspection and fostering a deeper understanding of their “Chineseness” and broader racial identity.
The project takes participants on a transformative journey by revisiting pivotal childhood moments that have shaped their racial consciousness. The project immerse the participants in these powerful memories, including the vibrant racial dynamics that exist within Chinese families, family businesses, and among local peers. HOMEMOH prompts them to reflect on their own experiences and emotions, fostering a greater sense of empathy and self-awareness.
The carefully crafted environments and interactive elements create an authentic and captivating experience, allowing players to navigate through a rich tapestry of emotions, sights, and sounds. Through these encounters, the project weaves together personal histories and cultural heritage, creating a profound connection between the participants and the Chinese diaspora in Zimbabwe.
To further enhance the immersive experience, HOMEMOH incorporates cultural installations that augment the virtual environment. These installations serve as tangible reminders of the participants’ heritage, adding an additional layer of depth and authenticity to the overall experience. The combination of virtual reality and cultural elements creates a mesmerizing and thought-provoking journey that challenges participants to explore their own racial identity and the complex interplay between personal and cultural histories.

 
On Borrowed Time is a video installation aiming to portray and recreate the collective memories of Shanghai people living in the lilong, the typical form of residential alley in Shanghai in the 1990s and to reflect on the impact of irreversible urbanization and globalization on traditional architecture. The project intends to realize the presence and absence of lilong through the interplay between real and fictional worlds. Rather than a complete restoration of a specific lilong site, the project is composed of cultural signifiers as a reflection of the artist’s own experience and perception of how the architecture has shaped Shanghai people‘s personalities, lifestyles and human relations.

 
Soup of The Day is an alternate reality game about memories and emotions. Alternate Reality Games, also known as ARG, are a relatively new media form which is “an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions”(162 Meifert-Menhard). The non-linear storytelling, multi-platform, and interactivity features of ARGs bring new possibilities to the narration. This project, hence, is aiming to explore the form of ARG game, trying to engage the audience the most in some certain discussion, with the immersive experience jumping back and forth between reality and cyberspace.
The game starts with a letter. Players receive mail one day and start the journey of exploring their lost identity. The letter led them to a website, and they needed to turn back to reality in order to find clues and resolve puzzles in order to figure out the username and password to log in. There are two major parts of the set up: a website and the physical scene which includes three different real locations. The website is written in html, CSS, and JavaScript, and includes some features of p5. The three spots include one showcase spot for exhibition, and bread stand where players can interact with and find clues, and an ending spot, where players can experience the climax.
By experiencing the main character’s seeking of lost identities, players may obtain a new understanding about memories and emotions. This is the topic this project intends to discuss through the form of ARG. People have many kinds of memories, long term, short term, describable and non-describable. Of all the describable memories, two different kinds of memories are episodic memory and semantic memory. Semantic memory is a cold memory, abstract and related to facts. Just like you know that tomato and egg soup consist of water, tomatoes, and eggs and other condiments, you know this fact, you have no emotion about this fact, or rather, you don’t have to have any emotion about this fact. You know something, that’s all. Episodic memories are event-related, emotion-related, and time-related. It is how you remember the day your mom made you a bowl of hot soup when you came home from far away, you remember how you walked in the door, the way your mom looked, what you said to your mom, the eager and some other looks on your mom and dad’s face, the complex feeling of that bowl of soup in your mouth, and the grounded and familiar feeling in your heart. Thanks to your episodic memory, you can still remember the episode every time you leave home, thus you can feel everything all over again, your hippocampus mobilizes every sense you have, and you take another sip of that day’s soup.

 
In B. Coleman’s book Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, the definition of avatar is “a computer generated figure controlled by a person via a computer. It is often a graphical representation of a person with which one can interact in real-time” (12). Such interactions between players and their avatars in digital games are relatively more intense. Therefore, most video games offer players diverse avatars to choose from and even allow players to customize their avatars like appearance, personality and skills. When it comes to figures of avatars in role-playing games, mages, knights or rogues are the most common avatars provided by them. There are games that offer more bizarre avatars like animals, but most of them are humanoid. VRChat, a virtual world platform that allows users to interact with others as their own customized avatars. Even such a game that encourages players to represent themselves in diverse avatars has a hidden standard: all avatars have to be humanoid. Soraker argues that “first-person view to be the minimal requirement of virtual reality, since it truly immerses a participant in the virtual reality, far beyond any metaphorical sense” (63). There exists video games that feature non-humanoid avatars like Everything and Stray, but the number of first-person perspective games that feature non-human avatars in virtual reality is extremely limited.
Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness is an immersive VR project based on John Hull’s sensory and psychological experience of blindness. It makes people reimagine what being blind is like and gain a new feel towards darkness. The visuals are not presented with realistic 3D objects, but 3D objects composed of particles of blue light. Such aesthetics are relatively abstract. It might raise people’s empathy with the blind community, but it might undermine the practical significance. Such artistic and imaginary visual representations don’t reflect the obstacles that the blind community faces in public space like tactile paving being blocked, and obstacle free space being occupied. Due to the impossibility to create such experiences faced by the blind community through their own perspective without any abstraction, it raises the question of how to raise people’s awareness of the obstacles encountered by the blind community in public space through the medium of VR.
The key to connecting the exploration of applying a first-person perspective non-humanoid avatar to a VR game and the purpose of raising people’s awareness of the difficulties met by blind people is, a guide dog.