Concept Statement

We remember in places. A meal belongs to the desk where it was eaten. Rain belongs to the window where it was watched. Memory, at its most vivid, is spatial. We know this intuitively, but we have never had a medium that lets someone else feel it.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) can preserve not just an image of a space but the space itself, the color, light, and depth of a real place held as a cloud of millions of soft particles. Combined with VR, this means a person can physically step into a place that no longer exists, stand where someone once stood, and look around the way they once did.

But presence alone is not memory. At Demo Day, viewers stood inside a faithfully captured space and kept asking, while still in the headset, “where is this? why this place?” A captured space, on its own, produces a room. What turns a room into a memory is the part we do not usually think of as part of the place but carry in every memory of one: the quality of light, the ambient sound, a reason to be there. These are the design language of spatial memory, drawn not from technology but from how we actually remember.

This thesis is a curated archive of eight personally meaningful spaces, each captured in 3DGS and layered with three design elements:

Designed light, tuned to how the place is remembered rather than how the camera caught it
Ambient sound, restoring what the silent capture froze out
Personal narration, sharing what this place means in the voice of the person who lived it

The viewer enters VR, learns the gestures through a single guided demo video, and encounters the archive as a curved arc of photo cards. Pinch to select. The carousel dissolves. A 3DGS space loads around them, with light, sound, and my voice next to them describing what this place is and why it matters.

The archive format is what makes this a thesis rather than a single experience. One captured space is a tech demo. Multiple captured spaces, held together by a browsing system and a shared design language, propose a new format for how spatial memory can be preserved and shared. Any space that can be captured can become an entry; the design language can be applied to any of them.

This project draws on my background as a theatrical lighting designer. For years, I have used space, light, and atmosphere to transmit feeling to an audience. Theater is ephemeral: the light disappears when the show ends. 3DGS and VR offer a way to preserve and share spatial experience beyond the live moment. This is not a study of technology. It is the continuation of the same practice: designing how someone moves through a space, what they encounter, and what they feel.

Keywords

experience, memory, space, archive, lighting design, narration, preservation, sharing

Thesis Statement

Memory is spatial, but the mediums we use to preserve it flatten it into something you look at rather than inhabit. 3D Gaussian Splatting and VR now make it possible to capture a real place and let someone physically step inside it. But presence alone produces a room, not a memory. This thesis proposes that what turns a captured space into a shared spatial memory is the personal layer: light tuned to how the place is remembered, ambient sound, narration, and curation that selects spaces for personal significance rather than visual interest. Drawing on my background in lighting design, I built a curated VR archive of eight personally meaningful places, each layered with this design language, to explore what happens when a viewer is invited into not just a place, but the way someone else perceives and remembers it.