Through the Looking Glass: The Experience.
Independant Research Project at RCA (Sole Designer)
Project Overview:
Through the Looking Glass is a multisensory VR research project that investigates how perception, awareness, and embodiment shift when visual distortion is no longer treated as an obstacle, but as the condition of the experience itself.
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The project examines what it means to design for instability, partial clarity, and adaptation, translating perceptual distortion into a spatial and interactive system rather than a visual effect.
Tools:
Unreal Engine,
Blender,
Meta Quest,
Motion Capture,
Sound Design
Timeline:
September 2024 - May 2025
It brings together spatial interaction design, real-time XR development, sound-led navigation, and embodied research methods to explore how users learn to orient themselves within an altered way of seeing.
An Immersive VR Experience
What does it feel like to see the world without certainty?
Through the Looking Glass is a virtual reality journey that explores perception as a lived condition — not a problem to fix, but a space to inhabit.
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This experience is grounded in my own encounter with visual distortion and evolving clarity. It is a world where focus shifts, form becomes uncertain, and meaning unfolds with attention.
The Journey.
The experience moves through a series of perceptual phases, each with its own quality of seeing and being.
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In the beginning, the environment resists definition. Forms blur, depth feels unreliable, and familiar shapes dissolve into uncertainty. Here, perception itself becomes the terrain.
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As the journey progresses, the world responds to presence. Visual edges stabilize momentarily. Motion invites patterns to emerge. Clarity comes and goes — not as resolution, but as a temporary way of being.
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In the final phase, the space does not become perfectly legible. Instead, it becomes navigable. The user learns to orient, adapt, and find meaning within distortion rather than outside it.
The Interaction.
Participant inside the VR experience.
Interaction in this world is not about solving or completing. It is about adjusting and sensing.
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Movement affects perception, pause invites stabilization, and attention becomes the only tool that reveals context.
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There is no one right path and no final answer. The experience is shaped by how you choose to be present.
Participant inside the VR experience.
The VR expereince was shown to 60+ particinats, in real time.
Reflection.
Through the Looking Glass is not about restoring sight. It is about deepening awareness.
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It invites you to live inside uncertainty, to encounter distortion without resistance, and to notice how perception shifts when you stop trying to correct it.
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This experience ends quietly, not with solution, but with presence.
Outcome.
Over 60 users experienced the installation in critique and public showcase, with unprompted shifts in movement and embodied stillness observed.
The experience leaves perception unresolved.
Rather than offering clarity, it invites participants to remain with altered awareness and notice how perception continues to shift beyond the headset.
Recording of the full VR experience.