Aftermath of a War
VR Experience
A VR experience that asks: what does war actually leave behind?
Role
Interaction Designer
Collaborator
Rashi Baghre
Timeline
Jan 2025 to Mar 2025
Status
Published
Cross-functional Team
2 designers
Tools
This is a college project created as part of the B.Des Interaction Design programme at JKLU Jaipur. All assets, renders, and experience design are original student work.
A recorded run-through of the VR environment.
Captured from the Bezi prototype. The live experience runs in VR headset.
Warisdiscussedinheadlines.Rarelyinruins.
Aftermath of a War is a VR experience designed to shift the lens. Not on the conflict itself, but on what it leaves behind. Broken cities. Grieving families. Silence where streets once were. The project places users inside a post-war world and asks them to feel it rather than read about it.
Theworldhas56activeconflicts.Mostpeoplehaveneverfeltone.
War is one of the most covered topics in media. Yet the coverage rarely reaches the human scale. Casualty numbers. Political outcomes. Geopolitical shifts. The actual human cost, the destroyed homes, the displaced families, the grief that outlasts the fighting, rarely makes it to the front page.
We wanted to design for empathy. Not for information.
Each dot is one million displaced people
Sources: Uppsala Conflict Data Program, UNHCR Global Trends Report 2023
Step inside. Not as an observer. As a witness.
The core design question was: how do you make someone feel something they have never experienced? We chose VR because it removes the distance that screens create. You are not watching a documentary. You are standing in the rubble.
The experience is non-linear. Users move through a post-war environment at their own pace. There are no objectives. No narration. Just environment, ambient sound, and the weight of what happened there.
Environment First
The world does the storytelling. No text overlays. No explanatory captions. The environment communicates through detail.
No Win State
This is not a game. There is no completion. Users leave when they choose to.
Ambient Audio
Sound design carries emotional weight. Distant wind. Structural creaks. Silence that feels wrong.
Blender-Built Worlds
All environments are original 3D assets built in Blender. Not stock. Not photogrammetry.
Ambient sound
Silence
The loudest part of the experience is the moment the sound stops. Silence is the emotional payload, not the absence of one.
Three spaces. Three kinds of loss.
The VR environment is structured around three distinct zones, each representing a different dimension of post-war reality. Users can move between them freely.
Select a zone. Movement between all three is free.
Where the city used to be
The Street
Collapsed buildings. Abandoned vehicles. Propaganda posters still on walls. The street communicates a city mid-life that was stopped abruptly.
Three choices that defined the experience.
What this project taught us about designing for empathy.
Aftermath was the project where we learned that restraint is a design decision. Every element we removed made the experience stronger. The absence of a score, a timer, a tutorial, an objective - these absences are the design.
The hardest part was resisting the urge to explain. We wanted to caption every zone, add context panels, give users something to read. Every time we did, testers disengaged. When we removed all of that, they stayed longer and came out quieter.
Design for feeling is not the same as design for understanding. Sometimes the most important thing a designer can do is get out of the way.
What we removed
What remains is the design: environment, sound, and you.