Space Out VR:
Embodying Distraction in Virtual Reality
A VR experience that translates the everyday act of packing into the chaos of an unfocused mind.
Space Out explores how distraction can be felt rather than shown. What begins as a calm room turns unpredictable as sounds overlap, lights flicker, and objects shift out of place. The player’s attempt to pack a suitcase becomes an experiment in attention, revealing how ordinary spaces can mirror an unfocused mind.
VR Narrative
Prototyping
Embodied Experience
Interaction Design
Project type
Academic Project
Guided by:
Prof. Jayesh Pillai
Team:
Arindam | Anoushka | Kushi | Pradumn | Soumya
My Contributions:
Research, Concept building, Narrative Design
Duration:
3 weeks
Challenge
How do you embody an experience that happens
inside the mind?
Solution
We treated spacing out as a state to be felt, not explained. The experience blurs the line between attention and distraction, making focus a physical struggle. Re-engagement requires deliberate effort, with subtle friction built into every interaction. Through uneven feedback, shifting light, and warped pacing, the sense of time and control distorts, mirroring how the mind drifts and fights to return.
In Space Out, losing focus isn’t a failure; it’s the experience itself.
Research and Insights
Patterns we saw in distraction
Focus isn’t lost in an instant. It fades through subtle shifts in emotion, time, and sensory load. (Barkley, 2015; Sonuga-Barke & Castellanos, 2007)
We studied these moments to understand how distraction feels before it becomes visible.
Guiding principles for Embodied perspective
How do we design the mind we are stepping into?
To embody distraction, the player must inhabit it from the first moment.
You start in a world that already feels off—familiar but unstable, clear yet incomplete. Every system in Space Out follows this person’s internal logic, not objective reality.
Spaceout immersive journey
Three minutes. A trip to catch. A suitcase to pack.
But your mind jumps, the world shifts — can you stay on track?
You wake up mid-drift, surrounded by half-formed sounds and fading light. A message breaks through the fog, pulling you toward a task you can’t quite remember. Each moment that follows is a negotiation between focus and noise, between what’s real and what’s slipping away.
What begins as something ordinary—a room, a suitcase, a list—slowly starts to twist and lose coherence.
The journey that follows reveals how perception bends, how sound and sight fracture, and how the world changes when focus begins to slip.
1. Entering the Drift
The experience opens inside a world already in motion. Light flickers across unfinished textures, sounds overlap without direction, and your hands blur as if they belong to someone else.
The user begins within distraction, where coherence must be rediscovered.
2. Anchor to Reality
A message breaks through the fog: “Hey, are you ready yet? The cab’s almost here.” Its tone is ordinary, familiar, grounding.
For a moment, the world steadies. You remember there’s a trip to prepare for, though time feels thinner than it should.
3. Cognitive Overload
A checklist flashes across your view: twenty items, fifteen seconds. You read quickly, but before your eyes finish scanning, the list disappears. The absence lingers longer than the information itself.
Attention becomes measurable, defined by how much can be retained before it fades.
4. Constructing Normalcy
You find yourself in a bedroom that feels lived in and unremarkable.
The suitcase lies open. Objects scatter across the desk and floor. The soft hum of a TV and distant voices creates a texture of calm that is almost uneasy.
5. The Fracture Appears
You reach for an object, but sound interrupts: a ping, a flash, a horn.
The room’s geometry distorts into a grayscale void. Objects lose meaning; movement feels delayed, heavier than before.
Distraction transitions from background noise to active interference.
6. Negotiating Focus
The environment desaturates until only faint outlines remain.
You lift your hand, and a small bubble of clarity appears around it. Holding it steady reveals objects one by one, but each lapse lets the world dissolve again.
Motor control becomes a metaphor for mental steadiness.
Closure
The world quiets into a clean digital screen. Your results appear, responding to how many objects you managed to pack.
The feedback feels casual, almost teasing, yet it mirrors how long you held focus before surrendering to noise.
Designing the Experience
Space Design
The room was built to mirror ordinary domestic familiarity
A space that feels safe but restless. Objects are positioned to demand competing attention, creating an ongoing negotiation of priority.
The same environment, in two cognitive versions: the drifted and the real.
In the drifted world, lighting is flat, shadows dissolve, and spatial depth collapses.
In the real world, warmth and definition return, grounding the player through texture and contrast.
Gameplay sequence
Attention as Narrative
Interactions
Curious to collaborate,
brainstorm, or just talk design?
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