An interactive story to foster belonging.
Traces is a narrative VR experience for anyone leaving home for the first time to help navigate the feeling of loneliness and create belonging.
2024 MIT Reality Hack Finalist
VR Art direction, spatial design and worldbuilding, asset creation
45 million people in the United States are immigrants. 25 percent of them face anxiety, depression, and chronic stress.
How might immersive tech like Virtual Reality be used to support these people?
How might we use our own personal stories (80% of our team are immigrants) to bring more empathy and raise awareness of this lonely yet universal experience?
In Traces, you play the role of a 12-year-old who has recently moved to the US.
You navigate through the emotional moments of your new life.
In each environment, you encounter objects that trigger memories. These items attach to your in-game character when discovered and become part of your narrative.
They include the envelope that denied your father's visa and the ginger you helped your mother find in the vast American supermarket.
After your backpack is stolen by a group of kids, your teacher reveals that the secret to belonging is helping others. This guides you to help someone else feel at home in their new surroundings.
Our team Bowerbirds consists of story teller/video maker Wyatt Roy, seasoned developer Tavius Koktavy, UX/interaction designer & PM Pia Behmuaras, passionate researcher & designer Jia Chen.
They generously trusted me with the roles of Art Director and World Builder.
Our tech stack integrates custom Blender assets into an A-Frame powered WebVR that can be streamed onto any headset, anywhere, making the experience accessible to everyone. The look development was done initially in Blender and brought to Bezi to validate the scale of things and spatial quality in VR. The memories dialogues were all written and recorded at the hackathon, casting people from the team and hackers around us.
Given the short project schedule of 2.5 days, I advised the team to use a minimal aesthetic for legibility without compromising on visual impact.
Each space is lit with a lone spotlight on a monochrome environment for visual cohesiveness.
This allowed the hero assets with pop of colors to stand out.
The stylized low-poly art direction of the items give them a consistent look while ensuring VR performance with little optimization needed . There was no additional texture, all final visual fidelity is relying on A-frame native lighting.
The world of Traces is a memory palace, the environment themselves also help in telling the story.
The eight unique scenes that the player experience correspond to the emotional story beats of the main character.
The common domestic spaces, like the child’s bedroom to the classroom and skatepark are fractured to evoke a surreal sense and slight melancholy. The single spotlight in each space help guide the player to the next moment.
The eight environments exist on an infinite plane, resembling a series of mini sitcom sets on a giant soundstage. The player is guided by a spotlight that illuminates the next memory, while the current memory fades to black. The remaining spaces are not visible to the player. This straightforward approach addresses the common issue found in many VR experiences, where scene loading disrupts player immersion.
Following a short yet intense phase of construction and implementation, we presented Traces to 20 judges, all XR experts with various expertise.
Our interactive story deeply resonated with all the judges, particularly those who are immigrants themselves.
Maria Laura Ruggiero of SeirenFilms said Traces was “the highlight of the (Reality Hack) experience” and that she feel the emotional weight of the experience. Carol Silverman of Belongingsvr found our story deeply touching. Paul Hoover of ShapesXR mentioned that our project almost made him cry.
We felt our experience was more universal than we had realized, and that the dialogue we started can be very impactful.
A strong and clear creative vision enable team members to share ownership of the project while using their own expertise to further develop the shared vision.
Trusting in your team members' abilities gives them the confidence and the freedom to be creative within their domain. With significant skill overlap among the four designers in our team, each of us took responsibility for a specific area based on our experience. As the art director, I make the final decisions about the look and feel of the experience. Conversely, I trust my teammates with the story, sound design, and implementation.
For the experience itself, we aim to refine the main interaction and implement the starting and end scenes we designed but didn't have time to put in during the hack. We also discussed further interactions, such as reducing the player's movement speed as they collect more items and introducing ways for the player to drop a few items along the way to alleviate emotional weight.
We plan to host the experience online once all the refinements are done to reach a wider audience and continue the dialogues we started at MIT. The team is also planning to submit Traces to immersive film festivals later this year.
