Welcome to the Uncanny Valley is an immersive VR installation that transforms a psychological theory into spatial experience. Participants navigate digitally reconstructed environments that feel eerily familiar yet wrong, evoking unease through distortion, tactility, and sensory collapse.

 

The environments are composed of 3D-scanned public spaces, including stations, corridors, and transit interiors, captured using photogrammetry. The resulting virtual world retains broken textures, warped geometry, and spatial glitches. These fractured surfaces intensify the sense of claustrophobia, disorientation, and emotional instability, turning everyday architecture into something unsettling and unresolved.

 

Embedded within the architecture are lifelike human forms that collapse the boundary between body and environment. Outside the headset, a hyper-realistic silicone face—identical to one seen in VR—invites physical touch. This tactile element bridges digital simulation and material reality, deepening the embodied experience of the uncanny.

 

The work reflects on the emotional charge held within public infrastructure: spaces we move through daily, often without noticing. By manipulating their spatial and material coherence, the installation surfaces the latent psychological tension embedded in the familiar. It invites viewers to consider their role within these environments and the narratives we construct through movement, memory, and presence.

 

Through photogrammetry, simulation, sound, and sculptural intervention, Welcome to the Uncanny Valley positions space not as neutral background but as an affective system capable of unsettling, reflecting, and shaping experience. It operates at the intersection of digital realism and psychological inquiry, where design becomes a way of revealing what often remains unseen.