Bringing Korean into Life
Does learner agency deepen engagement in immersive learning, or is guided repetition enough? Building on Kukshinov's work on VR and perspective-taking, I designed a VR Korean-learning experience (Unity, Quest 3) structured as three interactive activities with an AI NPC guide ("Yunsun") that answers learners' own interest-driven questions from a curated knowledge bank rather than scripted prompts. The project reframes immersive learning around agency and inquiry, opening testable questions about how agency and conversational grounding affect engagement and perspective-taking in VR.
Client
University of Notre Dame
DELIVERABLES
APK. Proposal doc
Year
2025
Role
VR Designer, Developer, Experience Designer
Research Question
How can immersive experience reveal the structural pressure behind homelessness, rather than simply asking users to feel sympathy for an individual story?
In Los Angeles, homelessness is often addressed through visibility control rather than structural care. Policies such as LAMC 41.18 criminalize basic acts of existence in public space, including resting, staying, or securing personal belongings. Instead of resolving housing insecurity, these policies often produce temporary displacement and reinforce the idea that unhoused people are a public nuisance to be removed.
This punitive structure is further supported by media narratives that dehumanize homelessness through images of tents, carts, and disorder, while rarely showing the structural causes behind housing precarity. For many communities, especially AANHPI individuals experiencing hidden or precarious housing, the crisis becomes even less visible due to stigma, undercounting, and cultural pressure to self-erase.
