Nina Shi


-Unity

  1. Unmute
  2. MOVEsician
  3. Resonance
  4. Light up the city
  5. Lonely Elderly
  6. Double World

-School project
     
  1. Seaweeds Bioplastic
  2. Agua Vista Park
  3. Ant Acho
  4. “MADicine”

-Personal project
       
  1. The Five Realms
  2. Illustration
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Disappearing Neighborhood
Unmute


Viturel Reality
Unity  
Interaction

“UNMUTE" is an interactive VR experience designed to retrain attention and perception, using sound as an entry point into a larger exploration of sensory awareness. It began as an inquiry into disappearing neighborhoods—how physical spaces and communities fade not just through urban change, but through our own disengagement from our surroundings. Now, it has evolved into an experiment in attunement—a process of noticing, sensing, and reconnecting with the world.


This project unfolds in four stages, guiding players from passive recognition to active exploration. Beginning with focused listening, players progress through sound-matching challenges, experience sonic illusions, and eventually take on the role of sound designers, reconstructing meaning through a dubbing mini-game. The final phase moves beyond structure, offering an open-world soundscape where players freely explore and apply their newfound awareness.


This experience is not just about sound—it is about perception itself. By blending VR’s immersive potential with the psychology of attunement, it invites players to break habitual disengagement and rediscover curiosity. When they remove the headset, they may find themselves more aware—not just of what they hear, but of what they have been missing all along.














In an era where people are more connected to digital spaces than to their physical environments, what happens when we stop noticing the world around us? The modern experience of daily life is often marked by distraction, routine, and disengagement, making once-familiar surroundings feel distant, unimportant, or even invisible.

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. 

                                     




The four-level experience of Unmute emerged as a distilled version of everything I had explored. Where earlier projects asked individual questions, this one proposed a narrative arc. 

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.



 

The first level asks very little. A sound plays, a set of short looping videos appears, and the player must match what they hear to what they see. It’s familiar, almost like a quiz. But the intent isn’t correctness. It’s the moment that follows the first click—the pause, when the player realizes how little they actually registered in that sound.


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.





At the third level, the experience shifts from identifying to creating. Players are given silent footage and a selection of sound fragments. They construct a scene, not to win, but to discover. Often, what results is strange, humorous, or oddly emotional. Meaning becomes something they shape, not receive.


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.








Then, the last level opens, not with tasks but with space. An environment that offers no prompts. No instructions. Just invitations to roam, to listen. The idea was not to finish strong but to leave the room. To step back and let the player notice what they’ve started to notice.

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.

A Small Extension: The NFC Card









trailer video：









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.


To be continued...