The greatest Onna-musha: Tomoe Gozen

Virtual reality experience created for the East Asian Museum in Stockholm

2024

Overview — Put on a headset, and go back in time. Become one of the famed Onna-musha, the female samurai and learn from the best, Tomoe Gozen. Get yourself equipped for battle in this virtual reality experience. Developed in Unreal + AI for Meta Quest devices for an in museum installation situated in the Japan section.

My role—Designer & Developer

Responsibilities— wrote interview script and conducted interview with the Museums digital program coordinator. Facilitated concept development workshop with team, created the environment in Unreal.

Collaborators—5 designer/developers from Future Games course

Discovery phase

We conducted a semi structured interview with the program coordinator to understand the mission of the museum and their requirements for this project.

After discussing how Museums contain a large inventory of objects of which most are in storage, we were wondering, how can we show these items that do not have space to be shown? What else is missing? What are the forgotten stories? In our research of their catalogue, we came across a naginata - the battle weapon of the Onna-musha. That become our focus.

Thinking about what works in the context of Sweden, and how historically women have been written out of texts or their contribution minimised, we thought this concept could surprise and interest the younger audience.