Garden
of Eden

Overview

Garden of Eden was my second exploration into mixed reality and 3D modeling, following my earlier Virtual Garden AR project.

This time, I used Unity to begin building a larger virtual world that someone could move through in VR. The environment imagined a distant future where human life had disappeared and nature had begun reclaiming bedrooms, cities and underground infrastructure.

The viewer would follow fragments of a diary through the environment, gradually piecing together traces of the people who once lived there while witnessing the world that continued after them.

Context

I made this project while I was still beginning to learn 3D modeling, Unity and mixed reality.

After creating Virtual Garden in Adobe Aero, I wanted to understand how a more complete environment could be built inside a game engine. I was interested in making something that was not limited to placing individual AR objects into a room, but could instead function as a world with atmosphere, movement, sound and multiple connected spaces.

I remember being questioned very heavily about the purpose of the project when, honestly, a major part of its purpose was that I wanted to learn something new.

At that stage, I did not already know exactly what Unity, VR or 3D worldbuilding could allow me to make. The project was a way of discovering that through practice. I was learning how environments were constructed, how assets behaved inside a game engine and how a viewer might move through a virtual space.

The environmental concept gave that technical exploration a direction, but experimentation itself was also a valid part of the work.

Concept

The project imagines a far future in which human life has disappeared but the environments we created remain behind.

Nature has begun growing through bedrooms, streets, buildings and subway tunnels. The world is no longer maintained for human use, but it is not empty. Plants, fungi and other forms of life continue adapting to the spaces we abandoned.

The viewer enters as an almost omniscient presence moving through traces of someone else’s life. Torn diary pages guide them through the environment, connecting the personal story of one person to the much larger transformation of the planet.

The project asks what remains after people are gone and whether the planet’s recovery would expose how temporary our control over it really is.

Inspiration

The visual world was influenced by abandoned environments where nature or the landscape has begun overtaking human structures.

I looked at places such as Chernobyl, Bangkok’s abandoned New World shopping mall and Kolmanskop, where sand has moved through empty buildings.

These places interested me because they make human structures appear temporary. Buildings designed to feel permanent become fragile once people stop maintaining them.

I combined that imagery with a much brighter neon visual language. Rather than creating a realistic abandoned world, I wanted the environment to feel speculative, surreal and strangely peaceful.

Experience Structure

The experience was planned across three connected environments.

The Bedroom

The viewer begins inside a bedroom where someone once lived.

Personal belongings remain scattered throughout the space and diary pages provide fragments of the person’s life. The room establishes a small, intimate scale before the viewer enters the larger exterior world.

The environment is already being overtaken by plants, suggesting that the boundary between domestic space and nature has begun disappearing.

The City

The second environment is an abandoned city covered in vegetation.

Without human interference, plants have begun growing across streets and buildings. Diary fragments continue through this area, creating a contrast between the city as it once existed and what it has become.

The viewer is able to explore rather than follow one completely fixed path, allowing environmental details to carry part of the narrative.

The Underground

The final environment is an abandoned subway tunnel.

The darkness and moisture have created conditions for fungi to grow and evolve. Bioluminescent mushrooms illuminate the space in pink and blue, turning infrastructure once designed for transportation into an ecosystem of its own.

This area moves furthest away from the familiar world and suggests that nature would not simply restore the past, but continue changing into something new.

Visual Direction

The project combines abandoned architecture, dense overgrowth and neon lighting.

I used saturated pink, purple, blue and green throughout the environment. The color palette made the post-human world feel more dreamlike than apocalyptic.

I did not want the disappearance of humanity to produce only horror or destruction. There was also something peaceful about imagining the planet continuing without us.

The environments were intended to feel immersive and atmospheric, supported by ambient sounds such as:

• leaves moving in the wind
• dripping water
• birds
• distant environmental noise
• quiet music

The contrast between abandoned structures and flourishing natural life became the main visual language of the project.

Process

This was one of my earliest attempts at building a full 3D environment in Unity.

A large part of the process involved learning how to:

• import and organize 3D assets
• assemble scenes
• work with materials
• create environmental lighting
• establish scale
• position cameras
• plan player movement
• connect different areas into a larger experience

Unlike Virtual Garden, which focused on placing modeled objects into an existing physical room, this project required me to construct the environment itself.

That shift made me think differently about composition. I was no longer designing a single view. I had to consider what the viewer might see from multiple positions and how the space would unfold as they moved through it.

I also began thinking about environmental storytelling. Objects, diary pages, plant growth and changes in lighting had to communicate parts of the narrative without relying entirely on written explanation.

Learning Through Experimentation

The project did not begin because I had already mastered VR and had identified the perfect reason to use it.

I chose Unity because I wanted to learn how a game engine worked and understand what building an immersive environment actually involved.

At the time, I felt pressure to justify every technical experiment through a fully developed social or conceptual purpose. Being questioned about the project made me feel as though curiosity and skill development were not enough.

Looking back, learning the medium was part of the purpose.

Experimentation allowed me to discover what kinds of ideas VR could support. The environmental narrative became more specific as I learned what the technology could do. The project’s meaning and its technical development were not separate processes. They developed together.

This experience became important to how I now approach unfamiliar tools. I do not always need to know the final form before beginning. Sometimes making is how I discover what the project is actually about.

Mixed Reality and Unity

Moving from Adobe Aero to Unity significantly expanded what I could imagine building.

Adobe Aero had introduced me to digital objects occupying physical space. Unity introduced the possibility of creating the entire space, controlling its lighting, atmosphere, navigation and interaction.

The viewer would no longer only observe virtual objects through a phone. They could enter the environment through a VR headset and move through it at human scale.

This made me more aware of embodiment, field of view, movement and the relationship between the viewer and the environment.

It was an early step toward the spatial and installation-based work I became more interested in later.

Interaction

The viewer would have the freedom to explore each area while following diary pages as a loose narrative guide.

The pages were intended to create direction without forcing the viewer along one exact route. Environmental objects and hidden details would reward exploration.

The experience would use a VR headset, controllers and headphones, allowing the viewer to look around the environment in 360 degrees and interact with selected objects.

The interaction was still conceptual and prototypical, but it helped me begin thinking about how narrative could be distributed across a space rather than presented in a fixed sequence.

Outcome

The project resulted in a visual and conceptual prototype for a larger VR experience.

I developed the central narrative, planned the sequence of environments and created visual studies for the bedroom, overgrown city and bioluminescent underground space.

Although it was not developed into a complete commercial VR game, it was valuable as an early worldbuilding and Unity experiment.

It helped me move from modeling individual assets toward thinking about complete environments, navigation, atmosphere and the viewer’s experience inside virtual space.

Reflection

Garden of Eden is important to me less because it became a perfectly finished VR experience and more because it represents a stage where I was actively teaching myself how new spatial tools worked.

At the time, I felt like the project needed a larger justification before I had even been given enough room to understand the medium. The environmental message became the answer I was expected to provide, but my curiosity about Unity and VR was equally real.

I do not think experimental work becomes meaningless simply because its first purpose is learning.

The project allowed me to test a new medium, identify what interested me about it and build skills that influenced later work in spatial design, projection mapping and interactive installation.

It also showed me the difference between creating an object and creating a world. In a virtual environment, every decision about scale, lighting, sound, movement and placement contributes to the experience.

If I revisited the project now, I would narrow its scope rather than attempting several large environments at once. I would build one highly resolved space, strengthen the environmental interactions and develop the diary fragments into a more intentional narrative system.

I would also allow the project to openly present itself as a learning experiment rather than forcing it to claim that every technical decision emerged from a fully resolved conceptual argument.