Worlds of Grief is an exploration of grief's various strange, inexplicable stages of mourning. In this piece, I used the image of planets falling from the sky and orbiting around one's home to depict the strange reality that is dealing with grief: one where daily life is intruded by these giant, formidable emotions that keep you up at night.

This piece focuses on three stages in particular: anger, bargaining, and depression, which characterize the most intense and anguished parts of grieving. Each "world" that the user enters is an attempt to understand each emotion and simulate its atmosphere through the virtual reality experience.

First, the anger of grief is, as stereotypically depicted, hot and raging, but it is also often held within our bodies and turned against ourselves. I depicted this personal, ironic, and contradictory anger with bodies shouting endlessly against each other but simultaneously rooted in place, unable to make a difference.

Second, bargaining is depicted through a city torn apart into buildings that now orbit giant rotating scales. A chief characteristic of bargaining in grief is the constant "if" -- "If we had only done things differently, this would not have happened." These empty, balanced scales represent the truth: that there is no more measure for these things that have already left us. We can only move forward lest we get trapped in the cycle of obsessing over what we could have done, like the buildings suspended in orbit.

Lastly, depression is set in a lonely lagoon where a face shields itself against a rock face and covers its eyes. Its tears have pooled into a lake. It's set in a tightly sealed box, where many of our negative emotions are relegated when they are too much to handle: compartmentalized where other people cannot see or perceive them. However, a crack in the corner of the box sends the user into a free fall through fragments of that face and hands, showing the necessary release and catharsis of these dark emotions. The user falls, thus, into a big purple planet to represent acceptance, and a return to the same world, but now with a deeper understanding and a greater comfort and familiarity with the worlds of grief.

All in all, I struggled a lot with technical difficulties when making this project, but I'm ultimately very happy with what I achieved given those constraints. I didn't totally follow my plan -- instead, I adapted and changed my worlds depending on what I felt was more high-quality and cohesive overall. I also benefitted a lot from playing with lighting, music, and post-processing. It might also be worth noting that I made all five of the planet shaders myself by playing with the planets I previously generated in a weekly workshop.

In the final IM show, I will present the piece on a large television with a mouse attached so people can appreciate the detail of the various worlds of grief. I will also convert it into a headset compatible experience for a greater sense of immersion.

Inspired by Nicole Javelyana's Welcome the Host and Sarah Brophy's Desktop Screensaver Portals, I changed my idea and came up with Worlds Of Grief: a VR project that explores the 5 stages of grief.

I know that using the stages of grief as a framework for a creative project is a little cliche, but that was precisely I wanted to tackle. Grieving isn't "just" a simple, five-step process; it's highly personal, emotional, and even cyclical. Each stage is not just a word with a definition; it's an atmosphere, a journey, and a feeling. You can go from one stage to another, and even when you think you're done with the process, the grief itself doesn't really go away.

To depict that, I used the planet shader I made previously to make five planets that each represent one stage of grief. They look and move like otherwordly objects and orbit around a house which represents you and your emotional comfort zone. Colliding with each planet will take you to its world, where you will explore and navigate that level of grief before passing on to the next.

So far, I have made the main scene and started on Anger and Denial. I'm most proud of figuring out how to make the planets orbit, and I'm excited to continue building out the scenes so that they can communicate the atmosphere and vibe of each stage of grief.

Itch io Link: https://pkw2013.itch.io/progress

In "But where are you actually from?" I want to explore my identity as a Chinese person who was born and raised in the Philippines, but doesn't particularly feel like she fits into the international idea of what either of those countries are.

When I first came to NYUAD, I realized two things. First was that Chinese people in the Philippines are actually uncommon, even to Filipinos. If I got a dollar for every time someone asked me if I was really from the Philippines, I’d have quite a lot of dollars.

Second is that many people only have a very internationalized, touristy view of both China and the Philippines. People think the Philippines is all white sand, beaches, tropical paradise, and poverty, and that China is all about the food, the bright red Lunar year traditions, the language, and of course, the Communist party. However, I don't think the world I grew up in fits into either of these orientalist, exoticized, and highly marketed ideas.

Thus, I wanted to depict this feeling of alienation, dissonance, and fragmentation through a work of virtual reality that moves through three worlds: first, the exoticized Philippines, second, the exoticized China, and the real world where I live with fragments of both cultures.

All worlds will involve a mini first person controller who can navigate around objects in the space within a larger skybox. In the first world, people will navigate through various traditionally Filipino things like mangoes, tropical fruit, Filipino food, beach things, and Filipino clothes as they listen to one minute of me speaking in Tagalog with English subtitles and Filipino background music. They will also be able to see three video screens that depict different shades of the Philippines like the natural resources, the local cultural celebrations, and poverty. After that one minute, they will be ported to a second world that now depicts how people from different places depict China. The same set-up will occur (shown in more detail in the storyboard.) Lastly, they will be ported to my dorm room, which represents me and the fragments of both cultures I live with. I will also add a highly enlarged, distorted, and glitchy 3D scan of me in the last world to represent the confusion and disorientation I feel as a person between these cultures.

Assets & Scenes for Part 1: Philippines

Assets & Scenes for Part 2: China