Research Project

윤경 김
Dec 3, 2024
4 min read

Updated: Nov 25, 2025

Echoes of Home (formerly named "Shifting Grounds — Finding Home Within")

Interactive Research in Memory, Identity & Belonging

Where is your home? And what happens when “home” becomes something you have to constantly leave behind and rebuild?

I grew up moving between countries and homes, each time leaving behind something familiar. Over time, I realized that my memories of home existed less in the physical space and more in the moments, objects, and sensations that stayed with me. That realization became the foundation of this project.

Home is not a place—it’s a feeling we’re always rebuilding.

Echoes of Home is an immersive experience that explores the ideas of home, displacement, and belonging. Using interactive digital environments, real-time game engine technology, and AI-driven interaction, the project creates virtual spaces that evoke memory and emotion — inviting viewers to reflect on their own experiences and definitions of home.

At its core, Echoes of Home transforms digital space into a site for introspection and connection. While physical homes may be impermanent, an authentic inner home can be reclaimed and nurtured—a truth that endures through resilience, memory, and imagination.

Research Statement

My research explores how emerging technologies—especially AI, real-time 3D environments, and mixed-reality spaces—can help people reconnect with empathy, cultural understanding, and a sense of belonging in a fragmented world. Drawing from my multicultural background and practice in motion design and interactive media, I investigate how immersive storytelling can reimagine home as something fluid and emotional rather than fixed or geographical.

How can technology recreate the emotional texture of home?

Through my ongoing MFA project, Echoes of Home, I use Unreal Engine to create adaptive digital environments that respond to player interaction and emotional cues. Integrated AI-guided dialogue invites participants to reflect on their own memories and ideas of home, transforming memory into a living narrative of belonging. Ultimately, my work asks how digital worlds can do more than entertain—how they can become spaces for reflection, empathy, and emotional healing.

Background & Research Context

The idea of “home” has always been deeply personal to me—reshaped through the experience of moving across borders and cultures. Having grown up between South Korea, Thailand, and the United States, I’ve often questioned where “home” truly resides when geography, language, and community are in constant motion. Echoes of Home grew from this question, but it also responds to a broader global reality—one where the meaning of home is becoming increasingly fragile for millions.

According to the UNHCR (2024), more than 122 million people are currently displaced worldwide—the highest number on record. Climate change, conflict, and global inequality continue to unsettle where and how people live, while even those who aren’t displaced physically are uprooted emotionally by cultural, economic, or technological shifts. This project situates itself in that tension, exploring how technology can help us reimagine belonging in an era defined by disconnection and mobility.

Psychological and anthropological studies have long noted that our attachment to place is integral to identity and mental well-being. When that bond is severed, we experience a kind of emotional homelessness—a disorientation that transcends borders or nationality. Through interactive design, this project turns those invisible experiences into tangible encounters, inviting participants to reconstruct a sense of “inner home” through movement, reflection, and dialogue.

In this work, AI and real-time 3D environments are not used as spectacle but as tools of co-creation. The conversational agent listens and responds, generating imagery that evolves from each participant’s personal reflections. In this way, the system mirrors the act of remembering—fragmented, fluid, and ever-changing. This interplay between human emotion and algorithmic interpretation opens up new forms of empathy: a dialogue not only between user and machine, but between self and memory.

Echoes of Home ultimately asks what it means to belong in a world where stability is rare and identities are hybrid. By transforming personal reflection into shared experience, the work aims to cultivate cross-cultural understanding and emotional literacy—reminding us that while our physical homes may fracture, our capacity to rebuild connection through imagination and empathy endures.

Ben-Yoseph, M. (2000). Longing for Home: Displacement, Memory, and Identity.
Dossa, P. & Golubovic, J. (2021). Reimagining Home in the Wake of Displacement.
UNHCR. (2024). Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2023.

Research Goals & Methodology

The primary goal of Echoes of Home is to explore how immersive media and AI-driven interaction can transform abstract emotional states—such as displacement, memory, and belonging—into lived, participatory experiences. This project seeks to bridge the space between technology and humanity, reimagining how digital environments can evoke empathy, reflection, and cross-cultural understanding.

Reframe “home” as an evolving emotional process.
Explore human–AI co-creation as a mode of storytelling.
Develop a framework for empathetic interaction in virtual spaces.
Advance interdisciplinary research in real-time media.

Echoes of Home is built in Unreal Engine 5, utilizing its real-time rendering capabilities to create layered, symbolic environments that evolve through player interaction. The project unfolds across three interconnected zones—each representing a phase of emotional transformation: loss, reconstruction, and reclamation.

AI Integration
Procedural Environment Design
Generative Imagery System
User Testing & Iteration

In-Progress Development & Early Prototype

Early prototypes include:

AI-assisted conversation nodes for emotional reflection
Environment fracture simulations visualizing memory loss and reconstruction
Real-time AI-image generation, mood-based lighting, and sound design systems
Player-driven narrative branches informed by personal responses

Future iterations will expand the project into VR format, enhancing spatial immersion and embodiment to further test how physical interaction within digital space can affect emotional recall and empathy.

Interaction User Flow

AI Integration Test

Early Scenes

Future Direction

As this research evolves, I plan to continue expanding its scope within academic and collaborative environments—bridging design, technology, and humanities. My goal is to develop a sustainable framework for empathetic interactive systems that can be applied to education, cultural preservation, and wellness-oriented media experiences.

Scene 1: Disintegration of the Familiar

Another move. Another goodbye.

Environment preview