Echoes of the Home
Introduction Teaser
Live Demonstration
Case study01Research & processEchoes of the Home
Case Study / 01
Can expanded spatial perception help someone regain agency in a place that no longer feels safe?
Echoes of the Home begins with an autobiographical memory: at the age of ten, I witnessed a burglary while hiding behind a sofa. The experience changed my understanding of home from a protected interior into a space filled with unseen risk. I translated that memory into a narrative VR journey in which sound, vision and movement become tools for reconstructing the past, reading the present and imagining the future.
- Concept & research
- VR experience design
- Spatial storytelling
- Sound-led interaction
- Environment production
- Unreal Engine 5
- Blueprints
- Photogrammetry
- Metashape
- CloudCompare
Reframing the loss of control
The project traces unease back to the inability to perceive uncertainty in an unfamiliar space. Research into sensory augmentation, human echolocation and animal navigation suggested that perception is not fixed: it can be trained, extended and translated across senses.
Grid cells became the central metaphor. Because they support spatial navigation, memory and a sense of time, I imagined an enhanced grid-cell perspective capable of reconstructing the past, monitoring the present and predicting the future.
A three-part journey through time
The experience is structured as a progression from remembered fear to renewed awareness. In Scene I, the player activates five memory points to reconstruct the burglary through fragmented figures, footsteps, a lock being opened and objects thrown into a fire.
Scene II shifts attention to the present. Four personal objects - a watch, family portrait, notebook and first brush - reveal themselves through changes in sound as the player moves closer. Scene III turns those objects into possible futures, using a sequence of inner monologues to ask whether heightened perception can create security without producing new anxiety.
Building memory as a navigable point cloud
I scanned domestic spaces with photogrammetry, processed the material in Metashape and CloudCompare, and brought the resulting point clouds into Unreal Engine 5. Blueprint interactions connect touch, proximity and movement to visual and sonic changes.
Sound functions as both interface and narrative material. It draws the player toward what cannot yet be seen, locates emotionally significant objects and gradually transforms an unstable environment into one that can be read.
Enhancement is not the same as certainty
The final VR experience does not erase the original fear. Instead, it gives the player a new way to move through it: listening, locating and assembling meaning from partial signals.
The work also keeps a critical question open. A technology that increases awareness may restore agency, but it may also intensify vigilance. Echoes of the Home treats that tension as part of the experience rather than a problem with a simple solution.
