The LivingRoom

The LivingRoom is an ongoing conceptual project implemented in Unity by myself and Lu Yang exploring how alternative forms of interaction in VR can shape a virtual environment and express a user’s emotions.

Humans live in the physical realm where their emotions and feelings are invisible. Our surrounding environments have a huge influence on our feelings and we are driven by emotions and create an impact upon them, yet such processes are often not visualized in a form that we can perceive in real-time.

One of the significant elements of Virtual Reality is that rather than simulating physical reality, world makers are enabled to design “other realities” that are disciplined by invisible powers instead of the singular rule of physics. What if architectural space in virtual reality can be disciplined by the emotion of its inhabitants? How can humans perceive their emotional changes through reflections of the inhabited space and how can this kind of space create positive or negative impacts on the current emotional state of its inhabitant?

The “LivingRoom” project departs from these questions and proposes an interactive experience of “escaping darkness” to demonstrate a new type of reciprocal interaction mode between computer-generated environments and humans, where the two will influence each other through feedback loops.