Instructor

Sara Niroobakhsh

Created with

Unity

Time

October, 2022

This project intends to display the problem of how social media platforms shape us by displaying content that attracts us and giving positive feedback to every action that we perform on these platforms. I took inspiration from the documentary “The Social Dilemma” that these social media platforms create an avatar based on our behavior online and further exploit our information so that we could stay on the platform longer. And simultaneously, our behavior and thoughts are shaped by this process.

Thus, in this project, the user will be situated in an environment that simulates the place that social media platforms create for the user. There’s a human figure in the middle of the scene, representing the “avatar”, which is the digitized prediction of the platforms. The area that surrounds the figure represents the space that the platforms provide for the users to interact, so as to learn what the users like. The user can travel around in the environment and interact with some features that mimic what the social media platforms provide in order to see the users’ feedback on certain content: star (collection feature), heart (like feature), chatbox, and emoji. Some of the responses represent how the “platform” give positive feedback to the users, while some are indications of how the users might react to certain scenarios. With the user’s interaction (colliding into the objects), the objects will both perform physically and with some voiceover.

Instructor

Sara Niroobakhsh

Created with

Unity, Styly

Time

November, 2022

The project is further is further developed as an AR project where users will be presented with a virtual avatar of any person “generated from” their laptop in reality. The avatar is surrounded by objects we constantly encounter using social media, such as the like button, share button, and emoji. This intends to indicate how people are packed with all the sophisticated features of these digital technologies. The avatar itself is made up of footage of people’s activities on the internet, such as watching videos or flipping through Instagram pages, which intends to conceptually reveal how our activities online are shaping who we are.