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Thesis Project · VR Design · Participatory Research · Immersive Storytelling
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What She Carried is a research-driven immersive VR experience exploring generational trauma, memory, and identity through the objects carried across the 1947 Partition of British India. The project reframes history through intimate oral narratives and symbolic artifacts restoring emotion and nuance to stories often reduced to numbers.
Through participatory interviews with families across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, I gathered stories tied to everyday objects - keys, shawls, photos - as vessels of memory. These became the foundation for an embodied experience that blends:
3D storytelling and scene design
Using Unity and photogrammetry, I created a surreal but grounded space where users move through suspended moments anchored in personal artifacts.Spatial sound and oral history
Integrated multichannel audio from interviews and ambient soundscapes to evoke affective depth and presence.Trauma-informed design principles
Instead of reenacting violence, the experience honors silence, absence, and fragmented memory - acknowledging what was carried, and what couldn’t be.
At its core, What She Carried is an act of speculative remembrance. It challenges linear, archival versions of history and offers a space for reflection, empathy, and intergenerational healing.
