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Software used: Xcode, Reality Composer Pro, Blender, Claude Code
AI Tools used: Tripo 3D, Meshy, ElevenLabs, Suno, Midjourney, Claude Code
Solo design & development — philosophical framing, 3D generation pipeline, scripting
Year: 2026 (coming soon)
Three Apple Vision Pro portals translating Confucian role ethics, Sartrean existentialism, and Buddhist emptiness into embodied interactions — sitting, walking, holding.
#Installation #Virtual Reality #visionOS
Philosophy has not lost its audience. It has only lost its traditional medium.
Unlike scrollable text or short-form video, immersion requires the user's full perceptual field.
It therefore demands sustained attention. Research on immersive VR learning consistently finds the strongest gains in active, embodied environments. The same affordance that has been used for productivity and entertainment can be used for contemplation.Apple Vision Pro is not the end of this project but its starting point. With pixel counts and latency figures that finally meet the threshold of sustained, nausea-free immersion, consumer-grade hardware is at last mature enough to host a philosophical experience long enough for it to unfold.
#23M pixels/eye #12ms photon-to-photon latency #untethered #hand-tracked #passthrough
Different vocabularies, one idea: a person is a process. What you do makes what you are.
Two years of early schooling at the Sihai Confucius Academy gave me daily practice in the 自省 (zixing) self-reflection exercises this thesis returns to.
Design Approach: portals, minimalism, liminality.
An earlier version filled each world with culturally evocative props — wooden architecture, teacups, Bodhi trees. The result felt like themed rooms, not philosophical spaces. Each world now contains only what the idea requires: two figures and a table, procedural pebbles, a single lotus.
The passage from the windowed hub into immersive philosophical space is separation; the engagement itself is liminality; the return to the hub is reaggregation — with a transformed understanding.
A portal represents transition — a shift in perception. visionOS distinguishes windows, volumes, and spaces; the design moves from windowed selection into immersive space. All three portals share the same shape and size. Same shape means philosophical equality — the design argument for comparative philosophy.
Drawing on Roger T. Ames's Confucian Role Ethics, the self is not an autonomous individual but a role-bearer whose identity is constituted through the quality of relationships maintained with others. Ames coins human becomings in place of human beings: persons are engaged in perpetual self-cultivation through relational participation.
This is the only world in which the user does not act. There is no path to walk, no object to hold, no choice to make. The user sits across from a table where an elderly Master and a young schoolgirl are already in conversation, and the conversation continues regardless of their action — or inaction.
To sit, to listen, to be present in itself constitutes being in relation.
BGM: Generated guqin (Suno)
- The Master invites the user to sit.
- The Master glances at the user during dialogue — presence acknowledged.
- If the user walks away, the Master pauses and addresses the departure.
- Both characters were performed by the same actor — the teacher and the student are not two kinds of people but two phases of one process.
- Dialogue script is a modern interpretation of The Analects, revised by Prof. Roger T. Ames.
Existence precedes essence (Sartre). To be human is to be condemned to be free — to assemble the self moment by moment through decisions that have no prior warrant.
Walking is the core mechanic because existentialism is, at bottom, a philosophy of enacted choice — choosing one direction over another and committing the weight of oneself to the step. Pairs of pebbles appear within the user's physical space; the next pair only appears once the user steps. There is no path because a path implies a correct route.
BGM: Furniture-music ambient (Suno)
- Pebbles are procedurally generated within the bounded clearing — a spatial analog of Sartre's situated freedom.
- Walking past the boundary does not extend the world. It returns the user, then re-enters them into the same conditions of choice. Repetition equals commitment.
- Voice lines are drawn at random from a large pool inspired by Sartre and Cox — no two walks are alike, and no path appears intended.
Buddhist śūnyatā (emptiness) and anattā (non-self): what we call a self is a dynamic aggregate of constantly changing processes. Mindfulness is attention without object and without destination — attention that simply remains where it is.
When the user brings their palms together, a lotus emerges between them and slowly unfolds. Stillness lets it bloom and float free. Movement shatters it into drifting dust. The hands are the body part most often used in screen-engagement — acquiring, scrolling — and here are asked to do the opposite: not to grasp, but to receive.
BGM: Layered Tibetan singing-bowl drone (Suno)
- The lotus is not a reward for the gesture but an arising within it.
- Holding duration is part of the practice — long enough that "stillness" becomes ascetic.
- Instruction text is sourced line-by-line from Rāhula, Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Suzuki, and Loy.
Asset creation pipeline: 3D assets prototyped in Tripo3D, refined in Blender, rigged in Mixamo, animated against motion-capture data recorded at NYU's Tandon at the Yard, retargeted in Unreal, and composed in Reality Composer Pro for visionOS. Audio is generated with Suno and ElevenLabs and edited in Logic Pro. Claude Code was used to debug billboarding and customize hand gestures.
What the immersion is for.
The three traditions converge on one conviction: a person is a process. The portal — read through Turner's ritual structure — can serve as a threshold that separates, holds, and reintegrates the user with something they did not have before. And less environment leaves more room for practice. Vision Pro and the headsets that follow it are usually discussed in relation to productivity, entertainment, and training; the harder question is what the immersion is for.Limitations & Future Directions
Three traditions compressed into a few minutes risks the same flattening this thesis criticizes the scroll for doing to attention. The current design is solo-authored; future iterations would benefit from sustained collaboration with scholars and practitioners within each tradition, accessibility for users with limited mobility or hand gesture, and empirical evaluation through usability testing.
Prof. Roger T. Ames — script revision
Bryan Lai — mocap
Jiujiu Wu — BGM prompts
Prof. Todd Bryant — research direction
NYU Tandon at the Yard
Dr. Jabe Bloom
Prof. Dalit Shalom
"Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish." — ZHONGYONG 中庸