Welcome Home – VR Speculative Future Living

About this project.

‘Welcome Home’ is a group project consisting of myself, Emily Batten, Florrie Smith and Tooey Jones. We were given the topic of ‘Vanishing Places’ to think about where we would live in the future.

Looking towards a speculative future living space – we made a VR Time Capsule embodying the feeling of a ‘Home’ to illustrate the effects of climate change, technology, and our future living spaces.

It is comprised of various rooms – holding different personalities by those who live in them but despite the differences in each room, they all live under the same roof. Bringing together unique and independent beings, part of a larger community in this home – navigating the future, together.

Click here to enter the VR space

VR + 3D Models were made in Cinema 4D & Unity by Tigris Li.

Tigris’ Interspecies Living Room & Kitchen

This kitchen and living room shows a glimpse at a potential interspecies living space – where we can co-exist with living organisms and intertwine with plants.

This contributes towards a sustainable nutritional cycle whilst also benefiting from plants that naturally photosynthesize and purifies the silent chemical vapors of our indoor living space. From a dandelion coffee roaster, to a vertical farm that uses the brewed dandelion grounds and hydroponics for optimized space and maximized yield count, this can all be found in the comfort of one’s own home.

Emily’s Room Under Water

Room Under Water explores rising sea levels and the effects of climate change on environmental migrants. Environmental migrants otherwise known as ‘Climate Refugees’ are the people worst affected by the climate crisis.

No one is unaffected by the climate crisis, but due to extreme weather events, drought or rising sea levels many people are forced to leave their homes and/or livelihood.

As a result of the extreme weather changes, perhaps we will all become ‘Climate Refugees’ one day – provoking the questions, what is home. What was home? and where can we find it?

Florrie’s The Future is Technology

This room is an interpretation of a technology driven world design with imagination. Through self-observation, I was able to see that we are encouraged to rely on technology, especially in this pandemic. As a result, our screens are becoming the new virtual architectures we inhabit ourselves in and become familiar with.

Our devices are becoming a trap, stopping us from noticing what is going on in the outside world, damaging our perspective on life. Will people start to expect our physical spaces to act like our virtual ones?

Our virtual worlds are so attractive purely because you can design it however you want. Erase all the negativity and devastation to have a virtual location that suits you. Will we ever need to leave home if everything is accessible through our screens?

Tooey’s Testimony to Life in Lockdown

I asked 40 people the question: “What colour do you think represents life in lockdown?” and used the responses to document their emotional and personal experiences.

I have created an interpretation of a ‘Memory Jug’. Traditionally, the surface would be covered with objects associated with a person but I have chosen to decorate my memory jug using the colours that people associated with their experiences of living in lockdown.

As a comment on our human fragility, I make a connection between the spacing typically used to prevent damage to artifacts in galleries and the introduction of social distancing during the global pandemic.