Team Name: Multicolored Melody

Group members

• Brandee Easter, Sunny Shah, Jamie Artin, Sara Bonefas

Project Description

The purpose of the project is to give the user an experience of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition that provokes curiosity, but while often talked about as an interesting and even desirable condition, people’s actual experiences are diverse, ranging from enjoyable to overwhelming. Although other VR projects have tried to give people the experience of synesthesia, ours aims to bring diversity to this body of work and represent synesthesia as an individual and multiple experience.

Users will experience a variety of synesthesia experiences. We plan to represent real people’s experiences with synesthesia in order to show the diversity of the condition. Because there are many types of synesthesia, we are considering either trying to represent a few different types (such as grapheme-color, sound-color, etc) or to give a few different experiences of a single type to show that synesthesia is not a single condition. Using the Hololens, the user will experience colors, for example for sound-color synesthesia, projected over their environment in order to most closely represent synesthesia.

In an addition to a likely fun experience, we want users to take away a better understanding of the condition and people’s experiences of it.

Concept art

Equipment: Hololens

What we think we know how to do as a group:

• Some Unity experience
• Some programming experience

What we don’t know how to do:

• Unity for VR specifically
• Working with the Hololens

First steps:

• Researching synesthesia and other experiences that have been created about it
• Talking with synesthetes about their experiences
• Determining which types of synesthesia are most possible and interesting to try to create in VR
• Learning more about the Hololens