Project
Interview With Eternity
A soul before birth, choosing whether to be mortal — and all you can do is look.
Overview
You wake as a soul in an eternal void, before a life, and you are asked whether you want to be born mortal.
There are no hands, no controllers and nothing to pick up. Agency is removed on purpose: an immortal soul with no power to change the course of time should not have a grab button, and constraining the player’s physical capability to match the avatar’s condition makes the helplessness legible rather than merely described. You are not told the void is inescapable — you find that there is nothing to do about it. Gaze being the only input also makes this the most accessible thing I have built, which I did not design for and would keep on purpose now.
The mirrors in the void show no reflection. That came from a specific gap in DeVeaux et al. on attribute discrepancy in social VR, which found that people build avatars resembling or idealising themselves to different degrees — I wanted to know what happens when a user is given no appearance to choose at all. So the physical self and the virtual self collapse into the same blank thing, with no discrepancy left to negotiate.
There is no video and there are no screenshots of this experience, which is the reason it is a project here and not a case study.
Documents
- Project write-up The embodiment reasoning, the two cited readings, and where the idea came from.