Mixed-reality domestic fiction

Under development

Tenants

Opening sequence from the experience.

Tenants is set in your home. Not a model of it, not a recreation. Your living room, your hallway, the chair by the window. You are the main character. The other characters arrive as robot bodies; they sit in your chairs and walk your halls.

The piece is a domestic fiction set a few years from now, somewhere between a film, a game, and an improvised play. In that future, robots are ordinary household equipment. People who are away, or unable to be present, send one to do what needs a body: the cleaning, the dog, the heavy box. Headsets, not much different from present-day VR, are how a person spends an afternoon elsewhere... a remote shift, a concert, a game with friends in another city.

A headset can also put a person inside a robot. Someone in Montana or Malibu, or on the Moon, can come home through a robotic body. They walk through its rooms, move the furniture, paint a wall, spend an evening with friends back home.

In the story, your home is an apartment whose residents are elsewhere. One by one, they return through robotic bodies. Their separate lives, led in separate places, overlap inside your real rooms.

Immersive Return

An apartment elsewhere

The resident enters a body in the apartment itself: a remote return to a home that has kept going without them.

Third Space

A shared room, anywhere

The room at hand becomes the setting. Its furniture and open areas remain in place, while a shared social world takes form around them.

Immersive Return

Back in the body

At first, return means taking up an ordinary task that cannot wait. The fish need feeding. The apartment is familiar. The body makes the distance tangible.

First-person view through a robot body feeding fish in an apartment — Early visual study for Immersive Return.

Hammond, a screen-headed robot resident, in a tomato-red room — Hammond in the tomato room.

Immersive Return

Hammond stays in

A return can begin with the quiet fact that somebody is already there. The apartment has kept going. There is time to sit together, play a game, or talk before the next task begins.

Immersive Return

An evening in progress

The room does not reset when someone leaves. A game can be waiting on the table. A conversation can pick back up. The body gives each return a place in the life already underway.

A first-person view of robot residents gathered around a table shuffleboard game — A shared game in Tenants.

Third Space · One room, four conditions

The shared room arrives around its tenants

The same room remains underneath each view.

An ordinary contemporary apartment living room — The apartment before a return.

01 · The apartment

The room as it is

The resident’s furniture, television, lamps, dog, and familiar arrangement of things are still here while they are away.

A resident wearing a headset in the ordinary living room — A resident preparing to return.

02 · The return

A tenant comes back

The room remains physically present. A distant resident returns to it through a body that can occupy the same furniture, floor, and open space.

The living room with a spatial scan overlay — The room becomes legible to the headset.

03 · The room read

The room becomes available

The headset recognizes the furniture, floor, walls, and open areas. Those familiar objects give the returning tenant somewhere to be.

The living room transformed into an inhabited Tenants interior — The same room, occupied differently.

04 · The apartment receives its tenants

The domestic story resumes

The same layout takes on another atmosphere. Familiar objects shift in color and surface. Robot bodies enter the room and the domestic story resumes.

Two robot tenants sitting together on a couch

A household of bodies

The cast includes people in the building and robot bodies that move through its rooms. A robot can be in house mode, carrying out an ordinary task, or it can be occupied by a resident who has entered from elsewhere.

The screen makes the difference visible. A neutral house face appears when a body is cleaning, folding laundry, feeding an animal, or taking care of the apartment. A resident’s face or chosen avatar appears when that person is present and available to speak.

Third Space

Company at a distance

Remote residents arrive as bodies in the room. They can speak, sit, play a game, or carry on whatever is happening when a tenant arrives.

Excerpt from the experience, viewed from inside the headset.

Close robot screen face — A face is contained by an actual object.

Robot sitting in a red chair — The visitor can occupy a body within the room.

Two robots seated on a couch — Other occupants are present as remote tenants.

Spatial premise

The system recognizes safe floor, furniture, walls, and surfaces. It places a limited number of bodies and props. Virtual skins give portions of the visitor’s actual room a new visual condition.

How the story moves

The building continues in house mode between visits. When a tenant enters a body, the social situation changes. They might take care of an animal, resume an argument, avoid a neighbor, or discover that something has changed in their absence.