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 is not a collection of images filed away in the mind; it is spatial, anchored to the rooms and surfaces where life happened. 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 images of a space, but the space itself, as a cloud of millions of particles that hold the color, light, and depth of a real place. Combined with VR, this means a person can physically step into a space that no longer exists, stand where someone once stood, and look around the way they once did.

My thesis project is a spatial memory archive: a personal collection of 3DGS-captured places, experienced in VR. Each entry in the archive is a real space from my life, preserved as a navigable 3D environment. An apartment in Brooklyn where I lived for a year. The same apartment at night, months later, a different season. The home I grew up in, in Taipei. A temple in southern Taiwan. A rooftop that no longer belongs to me. A sculpture on the High Line, captured while passing through.

The viewer enters VR and encounters the archive as a set of cards, each representing a captured space. Using hand-tracked microgestures, they browse, select, and step into a space. The moment a flat preview expands into a full 3D environment around them is the core experience: the transition from looking at a memory to being inside it. When they are ready to leave, they summon the archive again and choose another space. The interaction model is designed to feel like flipping through a personal album, except each page is a place you can walk through.

The archive format is what makes this a thesis, not just a single experience. One captured space demonstrates 3DGS and VR. Multiple captured spaces, held together by a browsing and transition system, demonstrate a medium. The argument shifts from “I made an experience in a room” to “I am proposing a new format for how spatial memory can be preserved, collected, and revisited.” Any space that can be captured can become an entry. The archive is inherently scalable, and showing even a handful of diverse spaces makes this immediately legible to a viewer.

Within each space, the depth of interaction can vary. Some spaces may hold embedded memories (photos, videos, moments surfacing from the locations where they happened). Others may rely on pure spatial presence: the feeling of standing in a place that carries personal significance, with nothing to do but look around and be there. The archive accommodates both. The design question for each space is not “what interaction does it need?” but “what does this space want to say, and how much intervention does it require?”

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 the technology. It is the continuation of the same practice: designing how someone moves through a space, what they encounter, and what they feel.

The core question is experiential: can a spatial memory archive in VR let viewers feel how memory is tied to place? And can 3DGS, combined with VR and a browsable archive interaction model, serve as a new medium for preserving and sharing spatial memory?

Keywords

experience, memory, space, archive, interaction, preservation

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. This thesis uses that possibility as a new canvas for spatial experience design. Drawing on my background in lighting design, I created a curated archive of personal spaces in VR, to explore what happens when a viewer is invited into not just a place, but the way someone else perceives and remembers it.