Ama's Momento
Project Lead / Narrative Designer / Prototyper
Capture the story, memories, and dreams of a grandmother through a mix of VR, AR, and installations.
Ama’s Momento is a mixed reality installation dedicated to capturing the story of a grandmother who dreams of building an art museum to preserve Taiwanese culture; the experience transforms Ama's dream into a virtual museum and sparks a movement that makes her dream a reality.
Ama means "grandmother" in Taiwanese. Ama's full name is Yoko Kung. She was both our audience and the story's main character. To better understandstand her story and her home, we, as a mix of 11 designers, engineers, and producers traveled to Taiwan to meet her.
Our goal in Taiwan was to gather footage of Yoko's home and learn more about her as a person. She hosted all of us in her apartment. There, we learned of Yoko's passion and respect for art; her modesty and hospitality made her everyone's Ama. We wanted to capture her in building the experience.
research trip; documentation from Taiwan
Trip Highlights :
Much of trip we spent attending different activities with Ama. We documented every location, which created key locations for the project.
• Old Home
• Artist Lou's Home
• Morning dance in the park
• Tennis Courts
• Golf Course
• Ama's highschool
Experience goals :
Using our experience from Taiwan, we created 3 experience goals.
1. Depict Ama's life in a relatable and authentic way
2. Capture Ama's dream of building a museum
3. Motivate users with a call to action
Where did we exist in this story?
After returning from Taiwan, we reflected back on a hundred hours of footage we took. We had the experience goals, but where did our team exist in this story? Much of the footage also included us. To explore this topic and use this as an opportunity to experiment with interaction, we built multiple rapid prototypes to show what this journey meant for us.
A big story challenge is designing a relatable narrative around Ama for an audience who had never met her. My first exploration was using webVR and simple interactions to capture the feeling of folding dumplings at home with my Grandmother (姥姥) and share it with an audience. In this experience, the user selects dumpling skins to fold them into dumplings, while listening to 姥姥 explain the steps for creating authentic dumplings.
webVR prototype: tying together cultures
Key Learnings:
1. Simple interactions allow space to digest more complex audio
2. Unexpected, fun results (bouncing dumplings) create endless joy
3. Signifiers from the web do not translate into VR space
After creating personal prototypes, we united our learnings into group prototypes. Golf with Friends referred to our time playing golf with Ama in Taiwan. We combined the action of VR golfing with 360 footage of our golfing journey.
Key Learnings :
1. Affecting virtual objects through familiar actions is satisfying
2. Intersecting 360 footage with 3D objects can make a space feel small
3. Giving users "checkpoint" feedback gives better sense of goals
Interaction Goals:
Creating these experiences helped us realize importance of relatability. To encourage a 'call to action' from the user, we must make the experience relatable to their own relationships.
1. Build empathy through skeuomorphic interaction
2. Create joy by defying expectations
3. Highlight intergenerational change
Our goal was to create an experience that showcased Ama's life and dream of creating a museum, while preserving the relatability of Ama being 'an ordinary grandma'. The Painted Corner was our first attempt to combine all of these elements into one interactive installation.
A. Photo Timeline
B. Ama's Dream
C. Virtual Preservation
D. Ama's Struggle
E. Next Generation
F. Dialogue
I created the narrative flow for the project. Each section contained one team member introduced the goals for the room.
Ama's Painted Corner experience layout
A — Photo Timeline
Introductary video describing the goals for this project, followed by a short timeline of Ama's life made of physical photos. Each photo has a date and small description in the back.
Guests learn briefly about Ama's background.
B — Ama's Dream
Consists of 3 physical elements from Ama's life — tennis racket, painting, photo. Guests can read about each object on description cards.
Builds more context around Ama's character around relatable hobbies and interests.
C — Virtual Preservation
AR painted portrait of Ama paired with her motivational quote. Introduces her hope of preservating Taiwanese culture through her painting collection.
Guests learn how Ama is highly ambitious and has a dream to build an art museum.
D — Challenges
Short film introducing Ama's childhood and challenges she faced while trying to build her museum.
Guests have a chance to empathize with Ama's struggles.
E — Photo Carousel & Next Generation
Interactive VR carousel projector featuring timline of photos of Ama, leading up to the team's trip. Continues with the team's journey and influence.
Guests reconnect with Ama's past and discover the thread of influence from our role in this story.
F — Dialogue
Open-dialogue with the team about the experience and the importance of close relationships.
Guests learn more about our journey and how the experience impacted them.
We ran playtests for 2 weeks and gathered a total of 30 unique feedbacks from all the guests. Through the feedback, we determined the most successful and lacking sections of the experience.
The Painted Corner
Pros :
1. Guests connected emotionally with overall narrative
2. Pairing familiar interactions with digital objects inside the novelty of VR brought joy
3. Guest clearly understood Ama's dream and motive
Cons :
1. Physical objects felt disconnected from rest of experience
2. Overall not enough context during experience introduction
3. Not enough emphasize on Ama's painting collection
Since the photo timeline was not a linearly-driven experience, guests often glanced quickly or skipped through descriptions, resulting in a lack of context around Ama's life.
Awu Chen
Anahita Dalmia
Kevin Ke
Nicholas Pudjarminta
Maryyann Crichton
Keshav Prasad
Gabriela Purri
Sagar Ramesh
Yimin Zhang
Kevin Ke
Nicholas Pudjarminta
Aakash Shanbhag
Chinmay Chinara
Kevin Wu
Gabriela Purri
Maryyann Crichton
Sagar Ramesh
Yimin Zhang
Awu Chen
Keshav Prasad
Kevin Ke
Nicholas Pudjarminta
After almost two years of traveling, prototyping, and collecting feedback from Ama's Painted Corner, we created the final version of Ama's Momento that fully showed Ama's story and her dreams of creating an art museum. As a project lead, I used my experience from creating Ama's Painted Corner and meeting Ama, to guide new designers and engineers in better understanding Ama's story and personality.
1. Memory Gallery
2. Ama's Journey
3. AR-t Gallery
4. Project Boundaries
5. Community Dialogue
6. Virtual Museum
We used feedback from Ama's Painted Corner to update this installation.
We added more interactivity with sticky notes to the photo gallery and an AR timeline that contextualized the photo events in Ama's life. Additionally, we included an engaging mobile AR animation component to a larger collection of paintings. Lastly we switched the order of rooms and inserted the community dialogue before the final VR section, giving guests a chance to reflect and clear up any uncertainties with Awu, Ama's grandson.
Ama's Painted Corner experience layout
Ama's Momento final layout
Story Flow
Light table consisting of photos from Ama's life. Guests can write their thoughts on sticky notes around the table.
Acts as both opening and closing experience. Gives a chance to personalize the project and welcomes participation from the community.
ROOM A — Ama's Journey
Light table with map of Ama's journey across Taiwan and America. Guests can explore a directed AR experience and listen to Ama talk about her life from an IPAD.
Sequences Ama's memories and gives clear story on her background.
ROOM B — AR-t Gallery
Gallery of several physical painting duplicates from Ama's personal collection. Guests can scan paintings with their phones to watch AR animations and learn more about the painting's importance.
Introduces the importance of Ama's personal collection. Helps guests empathize with the preciousness of these paintings through Ama's voiceover.
ROOM C — Projected Boundaries
Projection mapping introducing Ama's upbringing, her dream of sharing her painting collection, and the challenges that kept her dream from becoming reality.
Builds up empathy for Ama's difficult journey and motivation.
ROOM D — Communal Room
A moment of reflection and dialogue with Awu, Ama's grandson.
Guests reflect and discuss with Awu about the experience so far after learning about Ama's journey. Guests also learn about our role in creating this experience for Ama.
ROOM E — Virtual Musuem
A VR museum showcasing Ama's entire painting collection and several VR pieces the team created together. This is our gift to Ama.
Guests get a postive payoff following Ama's hindered attempt to create an art museum. They leave with a feeling of renewed hope.
The final result was a 20 minute mixed reality installation, which we showed at various different musuems and conferences, including Indiecade, VR for change, LA Asia Pacific Film Festival, Japanese American National Museum,Tainan Art Museum and Infinity Festival. We were met with overwhelming support and positive response from the community, with many asking how they could accoomplish a similar experience for their loved ones.
After displaying the experience at the Tainan Art Musuem, local culture officials reconnected with Ama and approved her proposal to create an art museum, signed off by the Taiwanese Government.
Awu Chen
Kevin Ke
Kevin Wu
Maryyann Crichton
Nicholas Pudjarminta
Alexandra thomopoulos
Cameron kostopoulos
David guevara
Georgina chiou
Shaoyu su
Sharleen chen
Shine chang
Hanzo huang
John marshall
Mingxuan li
Ralston louie
Steph ng
Brenda garcia
Janelle reyes
Sabrina stamnes
Contributors
Aakash shanbhag
Anahita dahlmia
Chinmay chinara
Gabriela purri
Keshav prasad
Max good
Sagar ramesh
Yimin zhang
Marientina gotsis
Candace reckinger
Michael patterson
USC Immersive Media Lab
USC Creative Media &
Behavioral Health Center
