Homebound: Spatializing the Immigrant Experience by Breaking Down Barriers in Virtual Reality

This thesis explores the production process of developing a virtual reality experience with an emphasis on digital humanities and the methods of adapting real-world events, narratives, and media coverage into an interactive, location based VR experience. The thesis contextualizes the production of an accompanying media project, which is informed by the history of U.S migration and the media’s impact on the opinion of Americans.
Through the observation of production methods, this paper summarizes the process of creating a VR experience that expands the established production pipeline to more fluidly produce immersive interactive content. Using Homebound: The Interactive Immigrant Experience, a collaborative VR project as a prototype for these methods, we were able to integrate and develop a media production pipeline that uses off the shelf hardware in unison with Unreal Engine 4 to produce a prototype VR experience that follows the narrative on a Latin American Immigrant.