I created an interactive virtual space where one can send a letter to their future self, approximately a year later or longer. After typing in their letter, based on the environment and language, your letter will be sent off in the form of an object that will join others of its kind and won’t be accessible until your timer has ended. While you wait for your letter, you can click on the other objects to view the letters of other people from all over the world who have also written letters to their future selves. You can read other people’s letters while others can read your letter. This project is meant to be a place where you can contribute to a bigger community of words and ideas through your individual letter, and is a place where you can reflect and be inspired from other people’s letters and thoughts. And once you receive your letter back, you can see how much you’ve grown and learned since you’ve last written your letter and see if you’ve met your younger self’s expectations.
Tools: JavaScript
Recorded Playthrough of All Three Environments
DETAILS, PROCESS, & FUTURE DIRECTION
Wanting to create a nostalgic and serene feeling, I added a very mellow and peaceful soundtrack only within the lantern environment so that it doesn’t repeat when displaying the other environments. For display purposes, I made each of the environments have different times of when you would receive your letter back: 30 seconds, 1 month, and 1 year.
Wrapping up my final project, I added a third environment, snow, along with my first two, lanterns and sakura flowers and expanded on my concept a bit more. Instead of just having different environments and objects with each one, I decided to focus each environment on a country, changing it’s language, font, and overall feel to it to match its culture. For example, the lanterns represent the Chinese culture while the sakura flowers represent the Japanese culture. I translated the various letters and text into their respected languages while keeping the snow environment in English. To expand on this project, I would like to continue to create different environments to represent all the countries so that this community of reading letters that I want to build within this project is as widespread and accessible as it could be. Through this project, I want to create a space where individuals can read and be inspired by other people’s letters from all over the world(in real time), and where they can contribute their own words by submitting their own letter for others to view.
At the moment, each of the three environments are three different files of code, so they can’t really interact with one another. I’d like to find a way to bridge them all together and add all the other future environments as well to create one big website where people from all over the world can access it and read all the letters in their own languages. A small problem I’d like to fix is that many of the typing functions, such as “Shift” and “backspace”, don’t function correctly when typing out text in the letter. Also, I’d like a way to capture all the data people put into their individual letters and put them into the objects so that the letters shown are current, and in real time, because at the moment, I use letters from the past that I directly typed into my code. Instead of being static, I want the data of the letters to be continuously moving and updating every time people submit another letter.
Even if it can’t be a universal website, I would also like to install this as an art installation where I would project the various environments on all the walls within a room, where you would first submit your own letter and then be able to walk around the room and read other people’s letters. In this case, I would remove the timer so that you can instantly see how your individual letter integrates with others. I would integrate sensors into my project where the system would be able to detect if you touched an object on the wall with your hand, and then display the letter as a result.
I originally wanted to create this project through virtual reality, so I would like to go back to my original idea and try build these environments in VR. I feel that it would be very visually stimulating and engaging to see this in 3D.
