The Toymaker's Bequest is a mobile puzzle narrative experience that tells a sympathetic story of a toymaker leading a reclusive life manufacturing mechanical toys that capture stories of societal struggle under a playful veneer.
Role: Technical Designer
Tools: Unity3D, Shader Scripting
As a vignette based interactive narrative, the game centers around 4 different automated toys: shadow puppets, marionettes, music box, and peephole theater. Each toy offers a different mode of interaction for the player to operate and unveil the narrative. The game is a USC Games thesis project by Jung-Ho Sohn and Yiwen Dai.
I helped brainstorm game design ideas, interaction design for 3 puzzles as well as implemented shaders that brought in ‘pencil shading’ visual effects to the journal part of the game.
Hack Music LA was the first ever hackathon organized by the LA Philharmonic to bring together 75 of the country's most creative musicians, engineers, artists, game makers, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs to create tools and experiences that expand access to music.
As a part of the Hackathon, my team created Maestro, a VR conducting application that could detect and analzye gestures of a conductor to control MIDI output in real time. Maestro won the Amazon Web Services and the Oculus prize for the best experience.
Role: Interaction Designer, Engineer
Tools: Unity3D, FMOD studio
Her Face is an interactive narrative. Mostly a text based experience, it is an exploration of Immanuel Kant's philosophy on morality. The fictional story of "Her Face" takes place in northern India sometime during the early 90's. A father-daughter relationship acts as a backdrop to the story on different definitions of kindness. It is a minimalistic game with the sole purpose of enabling players to understand (from Kant's perspective) the morality of kindness. Her Face uses facial expressions as inputs to proceed the story, adding another layer of empathy with its characters.
Role: Solo Developer (Design, Engineering, Art)
Tools: Unity3D, Affectiva, Photoshop, Visual Studio
A social, cooperative tabletop game that examines society, values liberty, and wants everyone to achieve self-actualization even if it means we must each give up pieces of our own privilege.
For All is designed to be played with 7 or more people from diverse backgrounds. Ethnic, social, mental, physical or any other diversity is crucial for this game’s premise. The game encourages individuals to evaluate systemic privileges and biases in our society, and to stand up for others to support each other’s liberties to make the world a better place.
Role: Co-Designer
Tools: Paper and buttons!
At the Mobile and Environment Media Lab at USC, I worked on the Virtual Design Workplaces research project. This research project explores how immersive design tools may impact the future of design and creative work. Insights from fieldwork with designers and engineers at Steelcase inspired a series of design fiction scenarios in room-scale VR.
Role: Interaction Design Researcher
Tools: Unity3D, Custom Networking Tools
We focused in particular on exploring how immersive interfaces could reshape practices of ideation, sketching, modeling, annotation, and prototype-review. We developed a methodology we call immersive design fiction to situate fictional embodied experiences in VR. As speculative interaction designers, immersive design fiction enables us to go beyond the simple prototyping of interfaces to also model the interaction rituals and surrounding social worlds that might envelope these experiences.
Divided was a week long project designed around the exploration of Space. I chose to depict the story of the Partition of India through minimal graphics and music. It is the story of neighbors turning against each other and the loss of innocence.
Role: Solo Developer (Design, Engineering, Art)
Tools: Unity3D, Visual Studio Code, Procreate
Walkabout is an over-ground walking intervention in immersive Virtual Reality that can help players to practice walking in motivating environments while achieving dynamic walking skills such as obstacle negotiation and walking in a narrow path. Players experience a wide range of dynamical environmental challenges during walking as well as altruistic feeling of helping the virtual world. Accurate and efficient walking to a target is the key element to win the game. By using vive trackers for the feet, we were able to give useful feedback to patients about their walking skills.
Role: Interaction Designer
Tools: Unity3D
Walkabout was created by a team of five including a current PhD candidate in Physical Therapy, a film maker and three MFA candidates from the Interactive Media and Games division at USC: Aram Kim, Patrick Bender, Daniel Batista, Wilson Stiner and Jivitesh Dhaliwal. Walkabout was created over a duration of 48 hours. It won the second prize at VRSC.