Data-U is an immersive mixed-reality experience set in the future, where visitors step into a lifesized time capsule of data privacy research collected from previous humans.
1000+ datapoints mapped out into a 3D cluster graph represent real people surveyed by researchers on their thoughts and experiences related to personal data collection and privacy.
The experience explores some of the complex issues around trust, fairness, and staying informed about online data privacy in the age of social media.
Visitors can explore different sentiment groups and compare thoughts and opinions from the people in them.
Interacting with a datapoint or opening a data capsule reveals more about the person behind it, including audio clips from their interviews.
"If somebody wants to find out your information, they're going to find out your information. So I don't see it possible to keep things private anymore"
"When I would be shopping and then suddenly— well there's an ad for what I was looking at, how handy is that?"
What started as an exercise in spatial data mapping became an opportunity for imaginative storytelling.
As the sole Designer and Technologist on the project, I was responsible for both conceptualizing and building the experience— turning intangible data into spatial layout and interaction paradigms and then translating that into Unity scripting and HoloLens deployment.
Rebuilding the project again in 2026 revealed that the hardest problem wasn't technical feasibility— it was narrative.
When I returned to update the experience in 2026, I hit a different kind of wall: the research data was seven years old. Why would anyone today care about what 1,000 people thought about data privacy in 2019?
By reframing the experience as an anthropological artifact from the future, the "old" data now had a new layer of intrigue to it.
I built a contextual reality for the entire experience as a time capsule viewed from 100 years in the future: a world where immersing yourself in a crowd of a thousand voices from a century earlier would feel genuinely novel and strange. Suddenly the age of the data became central to the experience in a way that was meaningful instead of distracting— visitors were given the chance to look back on recent history with a newfound sense of voyeurism.
I pushed the level of tangibility in the experience and the virtual environment as a way to play with scale by creating representative "capsule figures" for the people who had interview clips.
I rethought how to represent the people behind the audio clips. A fully animated 3D character was beyond my skillset, but I'd seen tiny figurines housed in small capsules online and something about them felt right— people sealed in little containers, waiting to be opened and heard.
