- Year
- 2021
- Medium
- Virtual reality / sound
- Artist role
- Lead Unity developer, 3D designer, interaction and spatial sound design
Dear Nobody is a virtual-reality love letter to the parts of ourselves we find difficult to welcome. A participant enters an intimate audiovisual world and meets Nobody, a companion who gives shape to thoughts and feelings that can be hard to articulate.
The work asks whether the spatial language of VR can hold vulnerability with tenderness. Its scenes, animated words, and original sound are composed as an encounter with one’s inner life rather than a lesson with a prescribed conclusion.
Unity build and iterations ↗Original project documentation ↗A private question became an artistic one.
Dear Nobody began with journaling about emotional suffocation, vulnerability, and the wish to meet those feelings more gently. Reading in Stoic and Buddhist philosophy helped shape Nobody as a character who could accompany a participant without telling them what to feel.
Make reflection something a person could enter.
I wanted to translate this inner material into a spatial encounter. In a Quest 2 headset, participants move through five scenes shaped by emotion, meeting floating thoughts, animated language, and Nobody along the way. The experience needed to leave room for their own memories rather than narrate mine alone.
Build, observe, and refine the encounter.
I developed the Unity world, 3D assets, scene transitions, VR interactions, and spatial sound as one composition. The first prototype let participants move between five scenes and interact with floating thoughts. After testing, I reduced visual clutter, transformed flat white text into animated 3D language, adjusted the skybox, and tuned interaction and audio where technical friction interrupted the mood.
The project went through three iterations in one month. My original documentation records testing with 11 participants, nine of whom used VR headsets. Their responses informed the changes visible between the early and later prototypes.
An intimate thesis encounter.
Dear Nobody was presented as an NYU ITP thesis. In the informal tests documented at the time, some participants described feeling less alone and wanting to stay with Nobody longer. The work became a way to share a personal question while making space for someone else’s reflection.
