From Home was a collaboration with Chandler Dagg, produced with Moving Pictures Theatre and Language Umbrella Media for Brighton Digital Festival, with support from the Sussex University Humanities Lab.
The experience
We Matterport-scanned a series of real rooms (kitchens, sitting rooms, hallways, the kind of domestic interiors that look unremarkable until you find yourself standing inside one in a headset) and loaded each as a navigable 3D environment into Mozilla Hubs, the open WebXR platform Mozilla was developing at the time. Visitors at the festival put on a Quest, walked through the scanned rooms, and found the submissions embedded around them: short audio pieces playing from specific spots on the walls, video clips framed like family photographs, 360-photo spheres you could step into for a moment, all sent in by contributors across the world responding to the brief what does home mean.
You navigated at your own pace. Lean in to listen, walk past if it didn’t grab you. The familiar grammar of a domestic interior gave the submissions a place to live; the unfamiliar grammar of being inside someone else’s room gave them weight.
Why Mozilla Hubs
Hubs was a quiet enabler in 2018. Multi-user out of the box, browser-based (no app install), Spoke scene editor for laying the Matterport meshes and submission media into the room, and remote joiners alongside the in-gallery exhibit. A friend in Berlin could walk through the same scanned kitchen as a stranger in Brighton, and the system would put both of them in the same room as avatars. For the budget we were working with, nothing else got us close.
The cost was the cost of Hubs: video playback varied by device, models sometimes didn’t load, the tracking would occasionally throw a fit. The kind of polish a commercial VR vendor would have ground out doesn’t exist on this stack. The point of the exhibit was the work and the people in the room together, so we accepted the rough edges.
The feedback loop
The piece had a second layer that made it more than a one-way exhibit. After visitors finished the VR walkthrough, they were invited to record their own reflection on home against a green screen. Those recordings were composited and added back into the virtual rooms for the next visitor. The exhibit grew across the run; what you walked through at the launch was not what you walked through at the close.
The boundary between audience and contributor wasn’t a metaphor. It was a tape loop.
The launch
The launch evening on 4 November brought the in-fiction and the on-stage together: contributors who had submitted material performed their work live on stage in front of the projected VR walkthrough. The event sold out. The combination of immersive tech and personal storytelling worked, partly because the VR side was used as a place for the stories to live, rather than as the thing being demonstrated.
What I took from it
Bespoke VR on a creative-tech budget was rare in 2018; the things that made it possible (Matterport for capture, Mozilla Hubs for hosting, Spoke for scene editing) were a brief, mostly-free window of usability that has since narrowed considerably as Mozilla pivoted Hubs to a paid product and then sunsetted hosting. The day-2 problem the work suffered later (see the Alternative Stages retrospective) is the same problem most of these grant-funded creative-tech projects share: you build something honest for one event, the platform underneath shifts, and the artefact stops working.
Still one of the more honest things I’ve helped make. It treated VR as a vessel for other people’s stories, rather than as the story.