View in store Description
Dunhuang VR builds a futuristic Dunhuang where ancient Buddhist cosmology, a lost civilization and science fiction converge: a world shaped by light, memory and cycles of reincarnation.
It is a gift for people who are curious about unfamiliar cultures and spiritual ideas, who long for a spiritual experience in VR, and who want to experience heritage not as something preserved behind glass but as something alive, mysterious and playable.
Entering it is meant to feel like stepping into a dream you don't fully understand at first: vast, beautiful, strange and slightly unsettling. Through exploration, spatial puzzles and the manipulation of light, you move gradually from curiosity and confusion toward reflection and transcendence. Rather than simply telling a story about reincarnation, the world asks you to experience the cycle, and ultimately to discover the possibility of breaking beyond it.
The experience was built in Unity, with PICO as more than a display: spatial interaction, scale, comfort and performance were validated on the headset, and hand and controller input, head movement, room-scale navigation, lighting and puzzle readability were tested on-device again and again. Only rough prototypes existed before; the new interactions, assets and visual effects were designed and built for this hackathon, with Maya, Blender and Midjourney also part of the toolkit.
How Tripo was used
Tripo was central to building this sci-fi Dunhuang, helping the author move quickly from 2D concepts to playable environments.
- What it made: Buddha structures, cave architecture, ritual mechanisms, stone platforms, sci-fi relics, pillars and props.
- In Unity: the assets were rescaled and recombined into VR spaces, then integrated with lighting, shaders, particles and interactive puzzles.
- After World Labs: concept images and visual references were first turned into explorable world studies with World Labs to test composition, scale, atmosphere and sightlines, and those studies informed the assets made in Tripo.
