CSC 699 Blog 2

From Place to Presence: Designing Virtual Environments for Empathic Engagement

The Emotional Architecture of Immersive Storytelling

Empathy design within immersive media isn't merely a matter of looks—it is a process of deliberate construction, in which every visual detail, every spatial arrangement, and every layer of sound contributes to emotional connection. 

For my research project, Arrival Space, I wanted to construct a virtual space that tells a story and lets users experience it. Drawing inspiration from real-world 3D scans in Scaniverse, hand-drawn conceptual doodles, and hand-curated Sketchfab assets. 

I embarked on a quest to view empathy as narratively and spatially constructed. In this blog, I explore how technical possibilities and artistic decisions can converge and create memory, identity, and experience as walking stories—stories to be seen and felt.

Capturing Emotion Through Real-World Scans

Empathy starts with presence—the feeling that you're actually somewhere else.

I originally planned to build Arrival Space nearly solely out of scans made in the real world with Scaniverse, time and place limitations made it necessary to shift strategy. Instead, Sketchfab—a platform that offers artist-created and broadly accessible 3d models—became increasingly central to my design.

Rather than incorporating these assets as padding for their genericity, I chose GLB-format models with care based on their emotional and story potential. These visual metaphors helped determine the emotional mood of the space, even if the environment itself wasn't photographed from reality.

Working with Sketchfab assets also permitted me to incorporate symbolism and abstraction—something less feasible with strict environmental scanning. By combining scanned environments with discovered objects, I created a hybrid narrative strategy: one rooted in real-world texture, but extended through poetic composition.

Collaborating on other people's models brought with it creative constraint. I needed to modify light, scale, and material to ensure coherence within every scene. This constraint, however, also generated intentionality. Each object featured had to fight for its place, not merely visually, but emotionally. In this sense, Sketchfab wasn't simply a technical tool—it became a collaborative storytelling partner that helped shape Arrival Space into an emotionally traversable storyworld.

Composing Narrative Through Spatial Arrangement

As I merged scanned environments with chosen Sketchfab assets, I ensured I remained cognizant of how scenes were stacked visually, narratively, and emotionally.

I also experimented with the orientation of objects, spatial movement, and lighting to guide users along a contemplative and emotive path. To illustrate, placing a photographed hallway between two emotionally charged spaces helped produce a moment of transition, such as how memory and thought tend to happen over a gradual span rather than at one instant. In another instance, I deliberately placed one chair aside from a crowded space to evoke a sense of absence or silence.

Rather than tracking a straight path, I allowed players to wander, idle, and return to locations at their convenience. This helped achieve the goal of designing for empathy, not to control emotion but to facilitate it. Every scene was similar to an emotional snippet, and their positioning in space allowed players to read and reconcile them on a personally meaningful level.

Even without a pre-planned storyboard, spatial organisation with narrative intent became a form of authorship. It allowed me to control what existed in Arrival Space and how it was experienced.

Conclusion: Designing to Be Felt

Through a combination of real-world scans, openly licensed 3d assets, and deliberate spatial composition, I sought to design not just for interaction but also for empathy.

While time and access limited how much I could scan personally, these constraints opened up new creative approaches, inviting collaboration with the work of others through platforms like Sketchfab, and challenging me to think critically about how meaning is conveyed through placement, pacing, and presence. Even without hand-drawn plans or traditional storyboards, the emotional architecture of Arrival Space came together through trial, intuition, and a constant return to one central question: how will this make someone feel?

Ultimately, designing for empathy is not about control but about inviting reflection. It's about crafting spaces that allow users to carry someone else’s experience, even for a moment. And in that act of carrying, even virtually, a connection begins.