Sarah Ayoub Javaid Tahir | From Border to Border: An Immersive Short Story in VR

 
From Border to Border is an immersive Virtual Reality experience that explores nostalgia, growing up, and being ensnared by the past. The experience takes the form of a journey in three parts: The Sandbox, The City, and The Sea. Throughout this journey, the visitor is both propelled forward by a vision of the sea and called back by an idealistic picture of the sand. In the end, the visitor finds the sea and realizes it was not what they envisioned. They are adrift and helpless, with only one way out.
The experience is inspired by and comes to terms with the anxieties associated with moving on and beginning a new chapter, and the journey closely mirrors where I have come from and where I am going. The Sandbox is meant to represent childhood; the City is meant to represent initial adulthood, and The Sea is meant to represent true adulthood and life beyond college.
From Border to Border evolved from an ideation process that considered concepts from childhood, recent experiences, and influential works such as “Dear Angelica”, “Traveling While Black”, and “Notes on Blindness.” Using these concepts as inspiration, I wrote a script that guided the design and construction of this piece. In terms of design, I laid out my initial plans for each location and the broader framework of the experience using techniques from Jessica Brillhart’s work on “VR and Cinema” and Danny Bittman’s series on “Becoming a VR Artist.” Finally, I constructed the experience by painting assets in Google TiltBrush, building scenes in Unity, and processing a VR video in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Throughout this project, I encountered several setbacks, most of which were due to the Covid-19 Pandemic and uncertainties in my living situation. Eventually, these setbacks became springboards into new avenues of storytelling that pushed this project into its final form.