Scenes: The Social Future
Web Game ✦ UI Design & Frontend Development
Timeline
November-December 2024
Special Thanks to Team
Angelina Thais
Kimberly Velez
Sheleah Harris
Role
UIUX Designer
Frontend Developer
Overview
Welcome to the next evolution of social connection — a collective virtual space that merges minds and emotions. We aim to use to process of discovery and critical fabulation to explore visibility and privacy issues through the embodiment of emotion.
Problem
The rise in influencer culture, performance of authenticity, and ease of parasocial relationships makes this a much bigger issue for vulnerable communities that are already very visible to begin with.
Brainstorming the issue:
Considering the current social media landscape, we were curious to explore how it could transform in the wake of speculative technology such as memory sharing.
Wireframing:
The World of Scenes
What a Scene!
Quantum computing has advanced to the point of allowing us to superimpose other people's emotions on our own. It offers the speed and complexity to simulate and store a snapshot of your mind palace and maps it onto a virtual scene.
Users are able to share these Scenes as episodic memories in a highly immersive environment where users can interact with memory objects in ways that feel more natural and tangible than antiquated internet experiences.
Behind the Scenes
Parallel Processing
of emotional states, memories, and cognitive patterns, ensuring a dynamic experience when someone "enters" a mind palace.
Neuro-Quantum Mapping Algorithms
that replicate the synaptic pathways and mental structures, creating immersive digital versions of the "mind palace" structures (e.g., interconnected rooms, landscapes of memories, conceptual halls).
Introducing Scenes
Scenes is a community of people passionate about sharing the deepest parts of themselves with others, effectively building empathy and fostering relationships.
I used a minimal color palette using shades of blue, teal and black to give a professional, calming atmosphere to the game, and just barely more than generic. As a well-established app, Scenes' design language is defined by round shapes and cool gradients to emphasize its mnemographic properties.
Key Takeaways:
- Our initial idea was far too large for the scope of the game and we had to cut the story down to one character.
- We could've used a program better suited to game development such as Godot, but it was an interesting experiment to recreate core gameplay mechanics in P5JS and HTML.
I wanted the fabulation to make people have second thoughts about their roles in online spaces. I think that it’s too easy to get caught up in the momentum of being curious about other lives that you forget that there are real people behind the screen.