Between the Worlds (VR)
VR Immersive experience
Creator/Producer/Visual Artist/Developer
PROJECT INFORMATION
Title: Between the Worlds
Duration: ~11 minutes (recommended time)
Language: English
Platform: HTC Vive
Year of Creation: 2025
Status: Finalizing User Interface & Sound Design
Medium: Virtual Reality/Installation/Mixed-media painting integration
Software / Tools: Unity, Adobe Suite, Maya, Nomad,
Procreate, OpenBrush, Shader Graph, 3D scanning
CREDITS (2025)
Created by: Christina Yijia Ren, in collaboration with
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Associate Producer & Sound Designer: Hanxiang Zhang
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Lead 3D Artist: Ethan Roth
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Supporting 3D Artist: San Xiu (三秀)
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UI Graphic Designer: Diana Shafikova
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Visual Consultant & VR Scene Support: Rui Shen
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Voice Cast: Mason Sawyer, Ryan Watts, Quinn Pierce
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Documentation: Congyi Chen, Louisa Fong
Between the Worlds is a virtual reality experience that combines traditional painting, digital art, and new media. It follows a painter facing creative block who steps into a series of painted worlds, each reflecting a different facet of the subconscious. The visuals are constructed from layered 2D paintings adapted in Unity, expanded with selective 3D elements and custom shaders, and accompanied by multi-voice narration and sound design. The project creates a dreamlike yet personal journey through memory, identity, and self-reflection.
The experience begins in the artist’s studio and gradually unfolds into 5 different painted worlds, each carrying its own mood and character. These worlds act almost like personalities in conversation with the player, guiding them through shifting atmospheres and symbolic spaces without offering a single fixed narrative.
< Concept Art for the five main scenes >
All of the visuals originate from my original paintings, both on canvas and digital. Each work was scanned, layered, and animated to preserve the tactile quality of painting while expanding into interactive VR environments. By blending traditional craft with new media, Between the Worlds becomes less about telling a linear story and more about entering an inner landscape — facing fragments of the self, embracing ambiguity, and discovering meaning through personal reflection.
< Behind the Scene and Working Process >
Exhibition: Between the Worlds: Traces of Inner Landscape
Between the Worlds: Traces of Inner Landscape was presented as a site-specific, experimental exhibition designed specifically for the Between the Worlds VR project. Staged at the Huret & Spector Gallery (April 30 – May 12, 2025), it explored how the immersive language of virtual reality could extend into the physical environment through spatial composition, lighting, and audience interaction. The exhibition introduced both the VR experience and the creative process behind it, translating the project’s inner, painterly world into an architectural encounter.
The gallery was divided into two sections. The front space featured five canvas paintings, each representing an early concept for the painted worlds. Alongside them, Meta Quest 3 headsets offered individual scene experiences from the VR story, allowing visitors to explore the environments in an accessible format without committing to the full narrative. Together, these elements highlighted the project’s origins in painting and revealed the development process behind the virtual worlds.
The second section recreated the artist’s studio from the VR narrative as an enclosed installation, serving as a physical entry point into the full VR experience presented on HTC Vive. A live monitor and large projection displayed the in-headset perspective, enabling bystanders to follow the journey and gain a broader sense of VR as a storytelling medium.
The exhibition received highly positive feedback. More than twenty participants contributed to interactive recordings and interviews, which not only captured audience responses but also informed refinements of the VR gameplay experience. The event gave the wider public an opportunity to engage with the project, bridging painting, installation, and VR into a unified encounter.
