Xin Feng & Meichun Cai. Juried Artist
Constellations
WebXR on the Styly platform
Artist Statement
The human fascination with the mystical power of vision and sight is a recurring theme in world mythology, resonating in legends like the petrifying gaze of the Gorgons or the ominous “evil eye” across various cultures. Despite the rich landscape of sight-based magic in myths, these concepts often fall into oversimplification, missing the broader narrative context. Our project pioneers an eye-tracking-based virtual reality experience, inviting participants to immerse themselves in global mythology from a first-person perspective. Journeying through tales from Arabian folklores to Asian spectral stories, players engage in a unique blend of storytelling and remembrance.
Our design transcends traditional textual storytelling by immersing participants in captivating visuals and interactive narratives, empowering them with supernatural vision power. We move beyond mere replication of narratives, fostering playful and open-ended interactions that ignite the audience’s imagination and invite diverse interpretations. Enabled by generative AI, each space presents players with a single-lined poem upon completing a mythic journey, offering fresh perspectives and unraveling open threads of possibilities. Players’ personalized journeys contribute to a shared mosaic of poetic expressions, co-created by explorers on unique paths. Through the integration of gaze interactions, immersive storytelling, and generative AI, our work encourages collective reimagination of myths, rekindling our connection with profound visual themes resonating across ages.
Styly link: Gaze into Legends: Crafting Personalized Narratives through VR Eye-tracking
About the artists
Meichun Cai is an interdisciplinary designer and artist working across digital media, installations, interactive technology, and mixed realities. She creates research-based experiments for immersive storytelling, spatial and cognitive augmentation, and plural futures within a more-than-human context. Her professional practice ranges from building next-generation platforms for democratizing 3D content creation to designing multi-modal interfaces with emotional AI. Meichun graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree in Design Technology and received her BFA from School of Visual Arts.
Xin Feng is a creative technologist and multidisciplinary designer who is currently working at Meta Reality Labs. She completed her master’s degree in Design Technology at Harvard University. Her work spans a mixture of game development, interaction design, XR prototyping, and web development, with an emphasis on human-centered multimodal experiences that connect the digital and physical realms. Her research areas cover social wellbeing in XR, affective computing and immersive storytelling. Her recent project was showcased at SIGGRAPH Immersive Pavilion 2023 and Signals.
Credits: Xin Feng & Meichun Cai