Download app Description
A Gift for My Future Self is a hand-tracking VR piece about not knowing where you will end up, and finding out that what you love keeps leading you somewhere anyway. The author made it as a gift to their future self.
You sit at an empty desk. Polaroids appear one by one, each from a place that shaped the author. Pick one up and bring it to your face, and you step inside it: 42 Seoul, where they learned to code; the exhibition hall from their first job; the grad school lab where they study now. Each place is a Gaussian-splat world generated by World Labs from the author's own photos, a little soft around the edges, the way memories are.
Every time you come back, the desk has changed. An iMac draws a picture with code (a render from the ray tracer the author wrote at 42 Seoul). A projector fills the room with a city in the sky. A VR headset lets that city unfold all around you. Each object brings the image a step closer: from a screen, to a room, to the space you are standing in.
None of it went to plan. The author was sure they would become a developer, and instead kept drawing what they saw and finding ways to step inside it. So the last polaroid has a gold frame and a question: "Where will I be?" It is completely black, and you have to shake it to develop it. When it develops, you enter the future. In the dark, the three memories return one last time, and from everything they hold, a world slowly assembles around you. It is an AI's guess at the author's future, built from the places they have been, and where they hope to be: building the worlds they imagine, and living inside them. The gift is proof that every detour was part of the way there, and a reminder to keep going. You experience it in the first person, so for a few minutes it is your path too.
Everything is done with your bare hands: pinch to pick things up, bring photos to your face, reach out and touch, put on a headset, shake a polaroid. It was built in Unity 6 (URP) with XR Hands; the worlds were generated with World Labs and the props with Tripo. The project was started from scratch during the event. The only pre-existing material is personal: a 2022 render from miniRT, the ray tracer the author wrote at 42 Seoul, shown on the iMac, and the author's own photos of the places. It is provided as a Windows app and runs on a Meta Quest over Link.
How Tripo was used
Tripo made the desk and the props you use there: the wooden table, the projector on its tripod and the VR headset.
- Props as triggers: none of them is set dressing. Each one is a bare-hand interaction trigger: poke the projector to throw a city onto a curved wall, or pick up the headset and put it on to break that projection open into a 3D world.
- Into Unity: the models were imported straight into Unity with the Tripo Unity Bridge, and scripts fit hand-grab colliders to their shapes at runtime.
