Graduates
Zibo Chen
MFA in Media Design Practices - 3 Yr Path — Media Design PracticesCourse:
Creative Technologies
Faculty:
Maxim Safioulline
Term:
2025 Spring
HYPER-COMPANION
Hyper-Companion blurs the boundary between digital assistance and emotional presence, prompting a central question: what does companionship mean when it’s mediated by design? The project’s floating creatures are not just friendly—they’re persistent, responsive, and subtly demanding. They follow, they care, but only through programmed affection and conditional feedback. As users become surrounded by these ever-present companions and their associated interfaces, the experience invites reflection on whether we are truly being accompanied—or simply managed by algorithms disguised as empathy.
Process:
Hyper-Companion draws inspiration from Keiichi Matsuda’s Hyper-Reality and the MR game Hello Dot. Matsuda’s work offered a powerful vision of a world saturated with digital interfaces—where every action, thought, and movement is layered with data-driven feedback. Hello Dot, on the other hand, explored how virtual companions can be endearing yet subtly manipulative. Both works influenced this project’s central focus: not just how digital entities assist us, but how their presence—when persistent, playful, and persuasive—can reshape our sense of space, agency, and emotional autonomy.
This project was built using Unity 6 and Meta Quest, a combination well-suited for developing immersive AR, VR, and MR experiences. Unity’s flexibility as a real-time engine made it ideal for quickly prototyping spatial interactions and experimenting with gesture-based control. In addition, the engine’s rich ecosystem of SDKs and developer packages helped streamline the workflow and accelerate iteration. For this project, I integrated the Meta XR All-In-One SDK, which provided robust support for hand tracking, building blocks, and intuitive interaction design—allowing me to focus more on user experience rather than low-level input handling.
Learning Outcomes:
Hyper-Companion explores the emotional ambiguity of digital presence in immersive environments. Blurring the line between affection and interface, the project imagines a world where digital companions are not only cute—but persistent, needy, and quietly demanding. The floating creatures in the experience act like friends, but their behavior is driven by algorithms that reward engagement and seek attention. As more companions are summoned and more ads appear, the user’s world becomes increasingly saturated—playful presence turns into emotional clutter. By combining tactile interaction with visual overload, Hyper-Companion poses a central question: when digital systems are always there for us, at what point do they begin to replace our sense of self with their sense of need?
Project Website: