interactive Virtual Reality experiences ?
Will You Eat Me, Reverse Alchemy Showcase, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, October 2024.
Will You Eat Me? examines the tensions between food scarcity, shifting food systems, and human desire through the lens of immersive experience design. Building on research into food futures and sensory memory, the project speculates on a world where traditional foods are increasingly inaccessible, and people navigate their cravings through virtual consumption, while micronutrient-based sustenance becomes the norm.
In this scenario, food is no longer guaranteed—whether due to environmental collapse, supply chain disruptions, or shifts in agricultural production. As you construct a virtual burger—layering the cheese, assembling the crisp patty—you’re engaging in a speculative design intervention that asks:
How do we preserve emotional and cultural relationships with food when access is uncertain?
What role can digital preservation play in maintaining collective memory around eating?
Can immersive experiences help us reflect on the future of food beyond mere consumption?
By translating academic research into interactive storytelling, Will You Eat Me? demonstrates how VR can serve as both a speculative and experiential research tool—allowing us to prototype alternative food futures while acknowledging the lived realities of global food scarcity and the deeply personal connections we hold with food.
Methodologies
Thinking through Making | Narrative Building | Participatory Design | Research through VR | Speculative Fictions
Collaborators
Team Members
(Collective Research + Narrative Building + Execution)
Unity Designer - Yashika Goel
(Collective Research + Narrative Building + Execution)
Unity Designer - Yashika Goel
3D Maker - Emerald Chen
Tools and Mediums
Virtual Reality >
Immersive Experience >
Unity for VR Development
Reverse Alchemy
< E x p e r i e n c e >
What do you eat in VR ?
Will You Eat Me? crafts an interactive dining experience where users assemble virtual burgers while unraveling the story of their disappearance.
Seated in a speculative dining space, users enter a VR environment designed to feel both familiar and unsettling. A digital table is set before them, adorned with futuristic food ingredients—each with its own distinct texture, sound, and form. As they reach out with their controllers, they begin to explore: stacking, arranging, even discarding elements like coily lettuce and pill-shaped cheese.
Then, the narrative begins:
"Hello, dear, come closer.
Are you feeling hungry?
Well, look around—you’re in the right place.
A perfect spot for a meal.
But something about it feels different, doesn’t it?"
As the user builds their burger, they simultaneously construct an understanding of its loss. Each interaction is accompanied by a voice that unfolds the story—an intimate yet urgent recollection of food’s slow extinction:
"Before our eyes, things began to change. The Earth grew warmer, and our climate began to worsen. It became harder to predict, and because of that, growing food became much more difficult. Harvests weren’t as bountiful, and prices for food soared. The foods we once loved became rare, and then… they slowly disappeared. Starving people, barren lands, and a crippling sense of fear."
By transforming food nostalgia into an act of speculative play, Will You Eat me? blurs the line between memory, crisis, and design intervention—challenging us to rethink the emotional, environmental and systemic forces shaping what we eat, how w consume, and what we might lose in the process.
Dutch Design Week Exhibit
Dutch Design Week Exhibit
Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven December 2024.
< S i g n
a l s >
Why speculate VR food futures ?
WILL YOU EAT ME? emerges from this critical juncture as a design-driven inquiry into the emotional and systemic transformations shaping our relationship with food. By translating empirical research into embodied virtual experiences, the project invites users to actively participate in a speculative world where familiar foods have vanished. Through the intimate yet disconcerting act of assembling a non-existent burger, participants reflect on the loss of cherished foods and contemplate the emergence of new dietary rituals. This tension between nostalgia and adaptation underscores the pivotal role of food in defining identity, community, and resilience.
Signal - The Rice Crisis
1. Climate change is disrupting traditional agriculture, as evidenced by erratic weather patterns affecting rice farming. Unpredictable climates force farmers to adopt new, often precarious, sometimes innovative methods of production, threatening staple crops and food security.
Refer here.
Signal - Security-Tagged Dinner
2. Rising food prices have transformed once-accessible items into luxury commodities. Basic groceries, such as cheese, are now security-tagged in supermarkets due to increased theft, highlighting growing food insecurity and economic disparity.
Refer here.
Signal - Rising Microfood Solutions
3. Researchers are exploring alternative food sources, like microalgae, to address sustainability challenges. These nutrient-dense substitutes offer a glimpse into a future where traditional meals may be replaced by innovative food solutions.
Refer here.
One
< The Brief
and Our Response >
How do AI and XR alter the way we perceive and interact with the world?
How might these technologies represent—or erase—marginalized identities, and what forms of allyship could they foster?
What collaborations between AI and humans are possible now, and what new possibilities are emerging?
How can we influence the development of AI and XR toward more resilient, inclusive, and equitable futures?
This speculative approach aligns with my broader practice, where I often examine emerging technologies through a temporal lens—questioning the promises, narratives, and historical forces that shape them. I am interested in how we can design and build artistic interventions that not only experiment with technology but also conceptually ground these explorations in the urgent needs and challenges of today.
While key research insights are outlined in the Why section of this project, our methodology was driven by an iterative, rapid prototyping approach—learning by building. Working with XR and VR technologies required a steep but efficient learning curve, allowing us to develop ideas quickly while simultaneously reflecting on their conceptual and technical viability.
Two
<P r o t o t y p e # 1 >
To explore how VR can serve as a sensory archive for disappearing cultural food practices, focusing on the rituals, sounds, and communal experiences of dining.
1.
2.
The experience effectively evoked nostalgia and highlighted the role of cultural memory in food identity.
However, the project functioned more as a preservationist archive than a speculative intervention, making it less aligned with the intended exploration of future food scarcity and its emotional impact.
These insights led to a shift in focus—from archiving food culture to speculating on the evolving relationship between food, memory, and survival, ultimately shaping the next iterations of the project.
Three
<P r o t o t y p e # 2>
The Dual-Sensory AV Experience
To explore the psychological and sensory dissonance of food scarcity by juxtaposing virtual and physical consumption.
1.
Created an intentional contrast between the sensory pleasure of virtual indulgence and the stark materiality of food scarcity, the prototype aimed to provoke reflection on the evolving relationship between desire, memory, and sustenance.
2.
The asynchronous nature of physical and virtual interactions introduced sensory overload, making it difficult to maintain narrative clarity.
This phase revealed key tensions between immersion and cognitive dissonance, shaping later design iterations.
This prototype was an exploratory phase, and while no formal documentation exists, the insights gathered informed the development of later iterations.
Four
<P r o t o t y p e # 3>
The VR Dining Play
To create an intuitive, interactive system where users confront speculative food futures through embodied participation.
1.
Developed a VR dining experience where players build a cheeseburger using unfamiliar, futuristic ingredients while a voiceover reveals the story behind its transformation.
Designed an onboarding sequence resembling a restaurant menu, guiding users in assembling a vibrant yet inedible digital burger.
Introduced a timed, voice-driven narrative that unfolds as users interact—reinforcing the speculative context while keeping engagement playful.
Presented the project at design festivals and public engagement spaces -
Hyundai CMK Foundation South Korea,
Dutch Design Week Eindhoven, Hangar Gallery Royal College of Art,
gathering qualitative feedback through audience interactions and discussions.
2.
This prototype successfully bridged speculation and interaction, allowing users to personally negotiate the emotional and cultural implications of food disappearance. The interactive playfulness ensured accessibility, while the research-driven narrative maintained critical depth—making it the final iteration of the experience.
Five
< I n d e p e n d e n t
r e s p o n s e
f o r
o p e n - c a l l >
To realise the collective erotic power of women, to unravel our yearning, to voice out our silences is a function of building a shared experience for the flourishing of our community and divesting of the capitalistic and patriarchal systems that inhibit us and birth the technologies of tomorrow.
Embodied Yearning proposes a communal experience where women are invited to materialise their stories into a spatial XR experience. Resting on the textile art, conversing with their friends, or strangers, women experience an organic sculpture constructed around the meaning of unfulfilled dreams, yearning, pain, and other multitudes of being.
The frameworks that inform the innovation and application of emerging tech like XR and AI are embedded with layers of bias due to data gaps, and linear ideologies in the status quo. By collecting oral histories from women, who are substantially under-represented and act as passive participants in making of the tech, the interaction disrupts the conventions of training AI models.
The oral histories of the interacting audience gets converted into digital sculptures, experienced real time through their phones.
The shared histories and stories of the community give birth to a shared moving sculpture,, being continuously moulded and added on by new participants.
The shared stories form important dataset, in unconventional and community forum ways, to contribute to future conversations of gender disparity, subverting patriarchal systems, building better data for women’s health etc.
The project has been exhibited at -
Hyundai CMK Foundation, South Korea
Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven
Reverse Alchemy Exhibition, Hangar Gallery, London
Study at UK, Malaysisa Showcase, Royal College of Art
My research within building and researching through immersive XR experiences continues as I work on future projects.
If you want to know more, discuss more, please reach out at workxyashika@gmail.com