Unity
Interaction
2025
Unity
Interaction
This project began with a focus on vanishing neighborhoods—initially examining how physical spaces and communities fade due to urban change and gentrification. However, as the project evolved, it became clear that the disappearance of places is only part of the story. Equally important is the disappearance of perception itself—the way we stop engaging with our surroundings, filtering out details, and losing curiosity about the spaces we inhabit.
Many of us experience our neighborhoods in narrow, functional ways—passing by the same streets without noticing how they change, tuning out everyday sounds, and interacting with our environments only when necessary. We rely on familiarity to navigate spaces efficiently, but in doing so, we may lose access to the small details that make a place feel alive.
This project challenges that habitual disengagement by offering an interactive VR experience that encourages users to listen differently, compare perceptions, and reconstruct meaning through sound. Instead of allowing the world to fade into the background, players are invited to re-examine their surroundings—first in VR, then in real life.
The goal is not to document loss, but to retrain perception so that players leave the experience more attuned to their environments. The real vanishing neighborhood is not just a physical space—it’s the unnoticed reality that exists all around us.
Each level became a stage of attunement:
Level 1: Find the Sound’s Source invites players into focused listening, matching a heard sound to its video origin. It introduces the idea that attention can be precise and satisfying.
Level 2: Similar Sound Matching complicates expectations, asking users to notice how similar sounds can mask different sources. This level challenges assumptions.
In the second level, the friction increases. The player encounters pairs of clips that look nothing alike but sound nearly identical. The rules feel more ambiguous. It introduces a kind of productive confusion—a soft challenge to their assumptions about how closely sound and image should align.
Level 3: Dubbing Mini-Game gives players agency: by triggering sound cubes and pressing buttons, they recreate the soundscape. This is where listening becomes making.
Level 4: Multisensory Open World is the quietest. Users are offered simple gestures and perspective-shifts, like becoming a cat or a tree. Or they can simply exist in the space, adjusting sound levels and reflecting.
What I realized along the way is that curiosity doesn’t need to be instructed. It needs to be invited. And invitation is what this project is trying to do.
Each level builds on the last. The interaction becomes more open, the space more freeform, and the experience more reflective.
Together, they do not offer answers, but an invitation: to listen, to look again, and to rediscover what has been hiding in plain sight.
trailer video：
A Small Extension: The NFC Card
exhibition display：
Challenge:
The core challenge of Unmute was designing for subtle, internal transformation—how to make users feel more attentive, not just entertained. Sound alone is abstract, and guiding players through four levels without text or tutorials required me to prototype feedback systems that “teach by doing.” I struggled to balance complexity with clarity—how to challenge assumptions without overwhelming or confusing the user.
Technically, I had to learn how to implement audio-source recognition, dynamic interaction triggers, and perspective shifts inside Unity’s VR toolkit. Since each level required a different logic (from matching sounds to reconstructing scenes), I built modular scripts to handle transitions, state changes, and sound playback. I also designed UX cues—timing, visual softness, and pacing—that encouraged reflection instead of task completion.
This project pushed me to design emotionally, technically, and structurally. It taught me how to build systems that support deep, open-ended interaction while remaining intuitive for first-time users.
BOOK:
UNMUTE didn’t appear fully formed—it grew out of months of listening, observing, and experimenting. My thesis book is a record of that journey: the ideas that sparked it, the discoveries that shaped it, and the moments that changed my direction. If you want to see the full story—messy sketches, unexpected turns, and all—you can flip through it here.