Drosera Obscura
Fall 2025
Drosera Obscura is a deeply immersive XR project that dissolves the boundaries between the organic and the digital through a multi-sensory environment shaped by sight, sound, scent, and touch. This project fully immerses the viewer into a virtual world where all of their senses are engaged. The viewer will interact with real-world animatronics which mirror the movement of the forms in-engine, allowing the viewer to reach out and touch the forms with their hands. The animatronics also emit sound in real life and in-engine, and they produce scents based on how the viewer interacts with them.
VR Experience
Below is an example of the VR experience of Drosera Obscura
Performance
In October of 2025, we had a performance in the Center of the Arts at Virginia Tech. It was held in the Cube, a room with surround sound and projection mapping technology. We made use of this, creating a 15-minute performance combining animatronic movements, puppetry, vocal performance, projection-mapped environments, and an immersive surround sound music. Below is a video documane
My Role in the Project
In this project, I worked on the construction of the animatronic, the communication between the animatronic and the game engine, and the supporting visuals for the performance.
Establishing communication between the animatronic and Unreal Engine was essential to match the movements of the model in-engine with the movements of the model in real life. I helped work on the Wifi Communication between Unreal Engine to PlatformIO, an open-source, cross-platform ecosystem for embedded software development. Then, we communicated between PlatformIO and an ESP32 board to control the movements of the animatronic. This pipeline allowed us to mirror the movements of the model in engine to the real world animatronic.
I also helped construct the animatronic, creating parts such as a rotating base plate, wheel stabilizers, and the handle used to control the puppet.
Finally, for the performance, I created 15 minute long animations and used projection mapping to project them onto scrims made by others working on the project.
Collaborators
Jason Hodge (Student in Creative Technologies, Virginia Tech)
Sydney Dechow (Student in Industrial Design, Virginia Tech)
Thomas Tucker (Professor in Creative Technologies, Virginia Tech)
Matthew Swarts (Georgia Tech Research Institute)
Joseph Kubalak (DREAMS Lab, Virginia Tech)
Dongsoo Choi (Professor in Creative Technologies, Virginia Tech)
Tohm Judson (University of Washington, US)
Brook Kennedy (Professor in Industrial Design, Virginia Tech)
Yamin Xu (Assistant Professor in Digital Arts, Bowling Green State University)