Memento Flori - a speculative design project

Imagining the role of VR in memorializing and grieving

Design HCI VR

How might virtual reality play a role in the grieving process? What would it look like if your virtual community came together to mourn your death, much as your friends and family would in real life? What might be possible if we used virtual spaces to memorialize lost loved ones?

These are the kinds of questions Memento Flori seeks to answer. By creating a real website for an imaginary virtual memorial service, we invite people to speculate about a future where virtual reality plays a role in the grieving process. We created a virtual world in Tivoli Cloud VR to explore this topic from three different facets and presented them as three testimonial videos for this imaginary service.

Our deliverable is a website and a set of testimonial films that explore three potential user journeys for Memento Flori. This is the final outcome of our work for IAT 848 AR/VR/MR course at SFU. In future, we want to use the website to provoke discussion about the consequences of virtual memorialization. From this discussion, we hope to identify considerations that can inform the design of virtual worlds and virtual death services. See the “website” for the speculative service here.

Topics: Virtual Reality, Speculative Design, Virtual Funeral

Ayaskant Panigrahi

Hopelessly in love with clean code and unobtrusive design!

XR Developer & Researcher