After studying cinema, then new media at UDEM and Lyon 2/ENS de Lyon, I began my research on virtual reality through a CIFRE PhD at Ryseup Studios. These were my first steps into the immersive world, arriving with key questions: How can we make virtual entities, environments, and humans truly interact? How can we understand the emotional impact of these experiences on participants? And how can we design VR worlds that generate powerful, lasting emotions?
We first explored these ideas with Winter Break, “In Winter Break, everyone becomes a child in an oversized world.” We created a contemplative VR space where scale, spatial layout, and subtle interactions worked together to guide attention and perception. By contrasting the player’s familiar body size with vast, enveloping environments, we studied how level design could naturally steer both focus and emotional response.
From there, we shifted into a radically different register with The Burning Descent, “A furious VR shooter in which up to 6 players battle each other in a quickfire deathmatch taking place in a colossal arena.” Here, the goal was to sustain high levels of attention under intense pressure. We built a competitive VR arena where verticality, teleportation points, and visual landmarks kept players oriented in the chaos, while the fast-paced mechanics demanded rapid, precise decisions, maximizing emotional engagement through constant challenge.