Beauty in Mortality

      Immersive Audiovisual Experience & Digital Anthology
 .     Master of Design - Human-Computer Interaction Thesis @ UC Berkeley 2022‍

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Background
Beauty in Mortality is an immersive audiovisual experience accompanied by a public digital anthology that shares personal and cultural narratives around grief and loss.

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Loss comes in different forms. Some expected and can be prepared for, others you never quite recover from.

   
   Motivation

My motivation for this work stemmed from deeply personal experiences of dealing with death that contributed to my own death phobia. Realizing I am not alone in this and that American culture further contributes to this fear of death and unsettled grieving, mourning and improper celebration of life, I wanted to explore how death conversations can be made more public and help those dealing with loss feel less alone.

   
Narrative Arc
   
Five-Story Narrative Arc in Immersive Audiovisual Experience

Themes of the 5-Story Arc included in the immersive component of this project. Each story is narrated by the individual who owns the story and is played viaheadphones using spatial 8D audio that makes users feel immersed in the setting.

   
Final Experience

The final audiovisual experience transported users toa safe space that felt ethereal and light. Each story teaches a lesson one has learned about dealing with their own loss. It does not shy away from talking about tragic and sad deaths and even urges users to think about their own mortality. Hopefully, at the end of this experience, users will work to live their best living life and cherish what is around them. And maybe even begin to start having death conversations more openly.