Last 4 Seasons in My Life

Room-Scale Mixed Reality Experience

"Last 4 Seasons in My Life" is a room-scale mixed reality installation that invites audiences to step directly inside the pages of a graphic novel. Representing the externalized psychological autobiography of a protagonist who has exactly one year left to live, the experience bridges spatial projection mapping, physical computing, and virtual reality to empower participants to reconstruct, curate, and archive her fleeting recollections.

DESIGN GENRE Room-Scale Mixed Reality // Generative Art

ROLE & FOCUS Solo Project // Designer & Engineer

TIMELINE & CYCLE 2022 // 2-Month Development

GRANTS & HONORS • NYU Tisch Dean’s GSO Grant Recipient
(1 of only 2 selected projects university-wide)

Technical Pipeline & Spatial Framework

MIXED REALITY SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Unreal Engine & Hardware Telemetry: Integrates embedded environmental sensors to track real-world physical manipulations. Drives synchronized projection mapping alongside an Oculus Quest 2 standalone network to cross-examine physical user position data with virtual coordinate spaces.

IDEAL INSTALLATION VENUE

Physical 10x10ft Balcony Chamber: The installation takes place in a closed, custom enclosed room designed as a replica residential balcony. High-lumen projection arrays expand environmental barriers, casting dynamic comic frames seamlessly over real physical walls.

Prototyping & Interactive Mechanics

PROTOTYPE 01

Bitsy Concept Micro-Prototype

Before scaling into immersive mixed reality, a rapid architectural prototype was developed using the Bitsy toolset. This phase focused entirely on mapping the aesthetic shifts of the four climatic seasons—leveraging strict color palette variations, specific month increments, and narrative textual constraints to emphasize seasonal progression.

Players traverse through a constrained, strictly linear left-to-right axis. Reaching the right boundary triggers an automated temporal teleportation into the next seasonal act, enforcing a unidirectional narrative trajectory.
🔗 Play the Bitsy Demo on Itch.io

INTERACTION DESIGN

The Archival Ritual: Polaroid Curation

The primary physical interaction revolves around an archival camera mechanic. Users utilize a physical Polaroid device to take snapshots of dynamic virtual occurrences. Once captured, participants physically clip these generated frames onto an installation photo wall inside the balcony space.

This physical action triggers system-level data pooling. The specific images chosen and physically hung by the user are immediately cataloged by hardware sensors, forming the algorithmic asset database from which the final, uniquely customized graphic novel summary is compiled.

Spatial Narrative Progression

PHASE 01 // INTRODUCTORY WANDERING

The audience steps into the physical balcony space. Surrounding projection arrays paint the walls with living comic cells. Users explore the real physical room, interacting with the original, unedited analog comic book layout.

PHASE 02 // SENSORY IMMERSION

Participants equip the VR headset. Emulated hand tracking and ambient environment sensors actively stream data back into Unreal, altering the virtual world topology dynamically as they interact with physical touchpoints.

PHASE 03 // ALGORITHMIC SYNTHESIS

At the conclusion of the seasonal loop, a brand-new generative comic layout is compiled inside the VR space—visually rendering a summary of the participant's specific curatorial journey and choices.

PHASE 04 // PHYSICAL MATERIALIZATION

The audience de-escalates out of VR. The external projection mapping on the balcony walls has transformed permanently, projecting the user's customized generative comic story into the shared physical architecture.