VR Home was a project developed at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. It sought to explore the applicability of virtual reality to the home: in creating home-spaces and expanding upon existing home-spaces.
As a research assistant on the project, I carried out a variety of tasks. During the pilot-phase of the project in Summer 2018, I assisted in multiple aspects of the research, design, and prototyping process, from designing VR spaces, to programming prototypes, to 3D modeling, to helping run playtests. Pictured below are three prototypes we created during this phase: a meditation room, a greenhouse, and a "hearth" room. Each of these prototypes targeted exploring specific aspects of what make spaces feel like "home". In the meditation room, we explored ideas of comfort and control by creating a space the user could diagetically change to best suit their relaxation. For the greenhouse, we were interested in ritual and continuous return, which we explored by the mechanics of caring for your plants and seeing them grow over time. Finally, in the hearth room, we were interested in comfort and continuity between the virtual and real spaces, and set up various real-world objects to mirror the virtual furniture, heat of the fire, and smells.
Beyond my work in the summer, I assisted in data analysis and writing for a paper based on key-findings from the Summer pilot. This paper was published in DIS 2020 as an Honorable Mention paper, and can be found here.
I also continued to work as a research assistant on a tangential research question during the Fall 2018 semester. It explored how aspects of continuity, connection, and traversal within VR Home spaces affects users' comfort, understanding, and feeling of "homeiness" in virtual reality home-spaces.
As a research assistant on the project, I carried out a variety of tasks. During the pilot-phase of the project in Summer 2018, I assisted in multiple aspects of the research, design, and prototyping process, from designing VR spaces, to programming prototypes, to 3D modeling, to helping run playtests. Pictured below are three prototypes we created during this phase: a meditation room, a greenhouse, and a "hearth" room. Each of these prototypes targeted exploring specific aspects of what make spaces feel like "home". In the meditation room, we explored ideas of comfort and control by creating a space the user could diagetically change to best suit their relaxation. For the greenhouse, we were interested in ritual and continuous return, which we explored by the mechanics of caring for your plants and seeing them grow over time. Finally, in the hearth room, we were interested in comfort and continuity between the virtual and real spaces, and set up various real-world objects to mirror the virtual furniture, heat of the fire, and smells.
Beyond my work in the summer, I assisted in data analysis and writing for a paper based on key-findings from the Summer pilot. This paper was published in DIS 2020 as an Honorable Mention paper, and can be found here.
I also continued to work as a research assistant on a tangential research question during the Fall 2018 semester. It explored how aspects of continuity, connection, and traversal within VR Home spaces affects users' comfort, understanding, and feeling of "homeiness" in virtual reality home-spaces.