Immigrant experiences

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.

The problem of immigration has been around since the dawn of man because humans cannot just stay in one place, especially if that place is not suitable for their lives and their families. It is a reasonable expectation of the human condition to want to feel free and safe because we do not live in a utopian society. There are social injustices, wars, and atrocities that threaten the most basic of human needs and freedoms in many countries across the globe.
Homebound, the virtual reality experience, which was developed in Unreal, aims to make sense of this crisis and shed light on the lives affected by this social ill. By using rich environments, virtual production and motion capture, to construct a place that captures the realism of the illegal immigration narrative, this manuscript will show how behavioral and gameplay psychology, when paired with environmental storytelling, can be utilized to craft impactful and empathetic, immersive stories and edutainment experiences for the player.