Project description

Opportunities

Interoceptive awareness is the ability to identify, access, understand, and respond appropriately to the patterns of internal signals. Training individuals to recognize internal sensations can improve resilience to stress, emotional instability, and mental illness. Interoceptive awareness is interconnected with body movements. Similar to dance and fitness, some psychotherapies incorporate creative movements to help clients with psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, and complex trauma tap into their internal sensations and establish a sense of presence.
Movement-based psychotherapy is a highly engaging, creative, and expressive process that relies heavily on imagination. Therefore, we see the creative potential of virtual reality to build connections between body and mind, and to help the audience relate to the internal sensations in ways traditional meditation tools cannot achieve.

Metaphor & Movement
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Metaphor is widely deployed in meditation and psychotherapies to help people better connect with their internal sensations. Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) is a modality of creative arts therapy that is based on the principle that the mind and body are interconnected. It utilizes metaphors associated with movements to guide the experience, such as "the ebb and flow of tides," to help individuals process emotions, thoughts, and experiences.

Goal
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Our goal is to help individuals better visualize and connect with their internal sensations by using body movements as metaphors.

Experience & Plot
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The audience can choose to sit in a comfortable position and will scan the sensations in the body with full attention.Breathe in, breathe out.The experience starts with the lobby scene with a statue in a distorted posture. After selecting a sensation by gazing at one of the four glowing parts on the statues (breathing, swallowing, heartbeat, and gut movement), they will be teleported to the sensory environment to experience a 2-minute guided meditation. As the audience explores more senses, the posture of the statue in the lobby slowly opens up and grows into a relaxed state.

The Voice script written by Meijie Hu

Design Process & Impact
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Our project takes inspiration from the surreal adventures inside the human body depicted in Rick And Morty's Anatomy Park episode and The Magic School Bus. We also drew from the works of renowned choreographers, such as Damien Jalet, who use body forms as dynamic visual patterns. We choreographed dances and designed five unique abstract environments to compose immersive visual metaphors to represent the nuanced sensations and rhythms in the body.

Our team designed the environments and characters using 3D design software before importing the assets into Unreal Engine. In Unreal Engine, we seamlessly combined the virtual environments we created with motion-captured dancers to create a harmonious whole.