Hassan Karaouni is one of the 11 winners of an Oculus Launch Pad scholarship for his project My: home, which allows people to share 360 videos of locations that are meaningful to them. In my Voices of VR episode about Google Earth VR, I talked about how the principle of embodied cognition explains how our memories are tied to geographic locations. But right now Google Earth’s resolution at the human scale is really uncanny, and you can’t go inside.
That’s where Hassan’s project tries to fill the gaps by enabling people to share 360 videos of places that are meaningful to them, while being able to navigate between them using a model of the Earth. This is quite an intimate and effective way to get to know someone, but it’s also the type of content that’s going to be a lot more meaningful to the creators in 10-20 years from now because it is so effective at evoking memories.