VR EXPERIENCE BUILT WITH UNITY
AUTHOR: AURORA CARUSO
COLLABORATORS: TRACY QIAO, JOANNA PANG, AMY YANG, JAEJUN CHUNG
PRODUCED DURING A PERIOD AT PARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN, NEW YORK.
2025
Concept: An immigrant mother enters an AI simulation game hoping to relive the memory of her child lost at sea twenty years earlier during the migration journey from Ethiopia to Sicily. As she navigates the virtual environment, the simulation begins to glitch.
The game’s creator is forced to intervene as Misrah’s experience turns into a nightmare. She must decide whether to stay in the digital world searching for memories of her child, or abandon the game to return to reality.
Lost At Sea is inspired by the real consequences of migratory phenomena and by the intersection between technological innovation and cultural representation. The player experiences the story through the eyes of the protagonist, Misrah. Misrah is a mother who relives, through an AI-guided simulation, the memories of her child lost to the waves twenty years earlier during their migration from Ethiopia to Sicily. Sicily, a primary landing point in the current Mediterranean migration crisis, is both the land of my parents and the place where I was born.
Inspired by Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, which I read during my time at Parsons School of Design, and by the project Synthetic Memories, which explores the recovery of lost or undocumented visual memories through AI image generation, I chose to ground this project in a real story.
I focused on Misrah after reading her interview with the United Nations, in which she recounts losing her three children in the Mediterranean at the age of 27. Shortly afterwards, I had a dream in which I tried to save her children, only to realize it was already too late. She had lost three children at just 27 years old, while sleeping next to them on a boat meant to take them to Italy. When she woke up, they were gone. Aziza was the name of one of the three children.
Misrah accesses a simulation of Aziza’s birthday memories, recreated through artificial intelligence, but due to a glitch in the system, the simulation collapses. At that moment, the game’s creator is forced to intervene as Misrah’s experience turns into a nightmare. At the end, the protagonist must decide whether to continue searching for the memory of her child among the waves or accept the unbearable reality.
Reaching the final boat leads to the last scene. The AI Creator’s voice calls from above, telling Misrah to leave, while the echo of her lost daughter rises from beneath the water, asking her to stay. Choosing to leave concludes the story; choosing to stay returns the player to the beginning.
This story is not merely focused on migration. It seeks to answer a universal question: what happens when technology and innovation do not advance alongside social progress? What
happens when an AI simulation becomes only a palliative response to a larger social phenomenon, such as grief caused by the absence of systemic policies?
This project aims to move beyond stereotypical media narratives about the migration crisis and allow participants to truly experience what Misrah lived through in VR. The uniqueness of this project lies in the way it not only interrogates the participant’s position relative to the migration crisis affecting Sicily but also questions the perception that AI can act as a tool for social progress, extending a hand towards realities far removed from the Western world from which it originates.
"I Am Alive, but I Feel Like I Am Dead": A Migrant Grieves the Drowning of 3 Children. United Nations News, 9 May 2021. https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/05/1091272
