Project Overview
Aév means age, eternity, lifetime. It is a tabletop mixed reality experience in which a mountain on a real table erodes, grows, and decays as you move your hands, so geological time becomes something you can touch and watch change.
Three things anchor the experience in space: your body and where you stand, the table, and the mountain itself. I worked with five classmates on it. I came up with the interaction paradigm, modeled the mountain and its environmental states, and built the surrounding environment, moving from clay and paper prototypes to Blender models and then low-poly builds in Unity. A teammate built the swipe detection system and another led the philosophy and final video.
Challenge
Geological time is too slow to perceive, and most visualizations of it are charts or timelines that you look at from the outside. The challenge was to make deep time something you experience with your body. That meant deciding how a small hand gesture could change eras without breaking the sense of calm observation we wanted, and building a mountain that could age believably across 53 states without overloading the headset.
Results
The project argues that natural processes reveal time and cycles, and that a suspended, observational mode changes how people understand time and space. Testing showed where the experience fell short. People found it too abstract, wanted more context, and often couldn’t tell what their swipes had done to the mountain. I proposed a small interface element that names the current era and shifts as the mountain ages, so people can connect their gesture to the change.
geographic states
prototyping stages