My Grandmother’s Bedroom

My Grandmother’s Bedroom is an interactive VR experience that explores memory, intergenerational connection, and the way physical spaces preserve identity. Users navigate a digitally reconstructed version of my grandmother Barbara’s bedroom, interacting with heirlooms and everyday belongings that tell the story of her life and our relationship. Personal memories and family history unfold through audio narratives voiced by myself and my mother, inviting reflection on how memory lives on through the things we leave behind. By leveraging VR’s immersive potential, the project allows users to step into and experience the atmosphere of this intimate space firsthand, emphasizing the emotional weight a room can carry.

Impetus

Spaces & Memory

Physical spaces are more than just backdrops to our lives—they’re shaped by us, and in turn, they shape how we remember, feel, and understand ourselves and others. A bedroom, a kitchen, even a cluttered drawer can silently narrate the life of its inhabitant through the objects it holds, the way it’s organized, the traces of routines embedded in its wear.

When I began developing this project, I was drawn to the question of how physical environments can reflect—and even preserve—the identities of the people who inhabit them. My own space has always served as a mirror of my internal state. As I’ve grown more confident and self-assured, my surroundings have shifted to reflect a truer version of myself—less aspirational, more authentic. During difficult periods, that too, is reflected in the space around me.

Over time, our spaces evolve with us. A childhood bedroom, a first apartment, a family home—each captures a moment in a person’s life, both materially and emotionally. The older we get, the more a space begins to resemble a broader snapshot, layered with accumulated objects, values, and stories. This interplay between personal evolution and environment became a key inspiration for this project. I wanted to explore how a space might not only hold memory but tell a story—how the arrangement of objects, the atmosphere of a room, and the context of daily life could form a kind of autobiography, a spacial version. This led me to my grandmother’s bedroom: a single room densely packed with personal artifacts, layered with meaning, and rich with narrative potential.

My Grandmother

My grandma Barbara lived with my parents and me for 17 years. She was my third parent, babysitter, and best friend. I had no siblings, and so growing up I spent a lot of time with her in her bedroom. She passed away nearly eight years ago, but her room is in much the same state as it was when she was alive. Even guests who never met her often comment on the warmth and personality the space seems to radiate. For myself and my parents, it has become a container of memories — not only of our time spent with her, but also remnants of the full life she lived, all of which culminated in that room. Eventually though, this space will cease to exist, and with it the physical memory of my grandmother. This project serves as a digital memorial to preserve both her space and her memory.

Environment

To authentically recreate the space, I used a combination of premade assets, 3D scans, and custom models. Each method served a different purpose—some for efficiency, others to preserve emotional and visual specificity.
For important furniture pieces—like the bed, dresser, and nightstand— stereolithography-based 3D scanning captured the original form, wear, and texture.
Some items couldn’t be scanned due to reflective surfaces or physical limitations—such as the bronze vanity mirror and the glass ornaments on top of it. In these cases, I modeled the objects in Blender, using reference photos to reconstruct their form and visual character. For added realism, I applied photo textures taken directly from the real room.

Narrative

Remnants of my grandmother’s life and personality are reflected in the objects throughout her room, and these become the foundation of the narrative that unfolds in the experience. As the creator, the story mirrors my own journey—one of recontextualizing her space and coming to understand who she truly was.

As children, we often take what’s around us for granted. I never thought to question the significance of her belongings or the identities of the people in the black-and-white photos on the wall. So the experience begins with my own childhood memories: simple, sensory moments tied to familiar objects—admiring her jewelry box, or lying on the rug watching old movies together. These early scenes are warm and intimate, grounded in the textures and details of her space.

As the story unfolds, users are invited deeper. Through photographs, heirlooms, and personal stories, they uncover parts of her life I only came to know later: her upbringing in Brooklyn, her family’s migration history, and the shifts in class, identity, and resilience across generations. Eventually, participants come to understand why she spent her final years in this room.

What begins as a quiet exploration of a personal space becomes a layered narrative about memory, loss, and intergenerational connection. By the end, the room holds new meaning—just as it did for me.

While the full experience has a 30-45 minute runtime, a 10 minute condensed version created for the DT Thesis screening and can be viewed here.