HOMECOMING Mixed Reality Experience

2025-12-28 23:34 UTC gpt-5-2 Open in ChatGPT ↗

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The player is immersed in a surreal desert landscape, where without having a body, they navigate through memories of their past self. As they move forward, they come across certain golden objects - ornaments - the shape of which they need to replicate by moving to unlock their past and reconnect with their body. Each ornament reveals a memory of their journey so far expressed as a 360 dance video.

The 3D environment for this project was digitally constructed from scratch, through an iterative process of concept sketches coming to life through world-building tools. The user experience was completed through the implementation of various visual effects that enhanced the user interaction and the development of the narrative.

A custom Image Classification Machine Learning Model was trained to enable the pattern recognition and enable the players to unlock memories and move forward in the experience.

with this: HOMECOMING Mixed Reality Performance x Interactive Experience by Choreographer Georgia Tegou & Visual Artist Kristina Pulejkova What happens when your world falls apart? You descend into the underworld and reclaim your ruins, pick up your wrinkled thoughts. And then… HOMECOMING follows the ghost of Lena Arbori, trapped in a liminal space between life and death. Guided by the eternal Watcher, she retraces fragmented memories of her past, reliving her relationships with first love Emma, her husband Franco, their son Marco and her friend Anna. Moving through moments of love and heartbreak in her ghostly form, Lena confronts her losses in a desperate search to reclaim her body and sense of self. At its heart HOMECOMING is a meditation on identity, loss, and self-discovery. The work draws from the evocative imagery of Louise Bourgeois, whose Femme Maison series explores the entanglement of female identity with the domestic space, containment, and fragmentation, and Caravaggio’s striking chiaroscuro technique, where light and shadow carve out moments of revelation and emotional intensity. Born from the question “Can we reverse entropy?”, the piece reimagines the myth of Eurydice, asking what could have happened if she decided to return from the underworld herself.

Live Performance Duration: 60 minutes Immersive Intallation Duration: 50 minutes

Here is a merged, cohesive version that weaves the experiential, narrative, and technical aspects into a single unified description:

HOMECOMING
Mixed Reality Performance × Interactive Experience
by Choreographer Georgia Tegou & Visual Artist Kristina Pulejkova

What happens when your world falls apart? You descend into the underworld, reclaim your ruins, and gather the fragments of who you once were.

HOMECOMING follows the ghost of Lena Arbori, trapped in a liminal space between life and death. Existing without a physical body, the player inhabits Lena’s ghostly perspective as they navigate a surreal desert landscape constructed from memory and loss. Guided by the eternal Watcher, Lena retraces fragmented moments of her past—her first love Emma, her husband Franco, their son Marco, and her friend Anna—reliving love, heartbreak, and longing in a desperate attempt to reclaim her body and sense of self.

As the player moves through the environment, they encounter golden ornaments—mysterious objects that act as mnemonic keys. By physically navigating and replicating the ornaments’ shapes through movement, players unlock memories embedded within the world. Each unlocked fragment is revealed as a 360° dance video, transforming embodied interaction into narrative progression and merging choreography with gameplay.

The immersive 3D environment was digitally constructed from scratch through an iterative world-building process, evolving from early concept sketches into a fully realized landscape. Visual effects and interaction design heighten the sense of presence, guiding the player’s emotional journey and reinforcing the unfolding narrative. A custom Image Classification Machine Learning model enables pattern recognition of player movement, allowing memories to be unlocked through embodied engagement and advancing the experience organically.

At its core, HOMECOMING is a meditation on identity, loss, and self-discovery. Drawing inspiration from Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison—with its exploration of female identity, containment, and fragmentation—and Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, where light and shadow sculpt emotional revelation, the work reimagines the myth of Eurydice, asking: What if she chose to return from the underworld herself? Born from the question “Can we reverse entropy?”, the piece invites the audience to confront memory, embodiment, and the possibility of reclaiming the self.

Live Performance Duration: 60 minutes
Immersive Installation Duration: 50 minutes

Here’s a rewritten version from the point of view of the creative coders, focusing on production, systems, and implementation, with the poetic language stripped back and the artistic intent grounded in technical execution:

HOMECOMING
Mixed Reality Performance × Interactive Experience
by Choreographer Georgia Tegou & Visual Artist Kristina Pulejkova
Technical Design & Development: Creative Coding Team

We built HOMECOMING as an interactive mixed-reality system that combines real-time 3D environments, embodied interaction, machine learning, and choreographic media. The experience places the player in a body-less state inside a surreal desert environment, navigating memory fragments through movement-based interaction rather than traditional controls.

The core interaction revolves around golden ornaments distributed throughout the environment. Each ornament represents a spatial pattern the player must reproduce through navigation and movement. We developed a custom image-classification machine learning model to recognize these patterns in real time, enabling the system to validate player input and trigger progression events. Successful pattern matching unlocks narrative content and advances the experience.

Narrative memories are delivered as 360° dance videos, integrated directly into the 3D world. These videos are triggered dynamically and spatially anchored, allowing choreography to function as both narrative content and interactive reward. The system synchronizes player state, ML recognition output, and media playback to ensure smooth transitions between exploration and memory reveal.

The 3D environment was constructed entirely from scratch using an iterative pipeline that moved from concept sketches to modular world-building tools. We implemented custom shaders, lighting setups, and visual effects to support navigation cues, interaction feedback, and narrative pacing. These effects were designed not as decoration, but as functional UX elements that guide the player’s attention and reinforce state changes in the system.

From a production standpoint, the project required tight integration between choreography, narrative design, and technical systems. We collaborated closely with the artistic team to translate thematic concepts—identity, loss, and memory—into clear interaction logic, system states, and feedback loops. The experience reinterprets the myth of Eurydice through interactive mechanics, using progression, repetition, and embodied input as narrative devices rather than linear storytelling.

HOMECOMING was produced in two formats:

Live Mixed Reality Performance: 60 minutes
Immersive Installation: 50 minutes

Both versions share the same underlying technical architecture, adapted for different audience flow, interaction density, and performance constraints.

If you want, I can:

Make it even more technical (engine, tools, ML pipeline, hardware assumptions)
Shorten it for a portfolio / grant / exhibition submission
Split it into “Interaction / Environment / ML / Media Systems” sections