Mushroom Memories
by Alena Grahn
Mushroom memories is an interactive installation designed to engage all the senses. Its centered around a 100 year old birch root and invites participants to interact with various elements through movement, an immersive sound experience, forest scents, and enhanced visual effects. Interwoven with augmented reality technology, the installation transforms the familiar physical environment into a magical wonderland, enabling participants to interact with both the physical and digital worlds simultaneously. The experience concludes with a grounding snack for the participants which includes mushrooms and berries that they “foraged” during the journey. This provide an opportunity for reflection and sharing of memories and insights, and a space to land together before going back to their routine."
In 2024 at Untold Garden, I worked on Mushroom Memories as both XR Developer and Technical Artist. As developer, I led the full build of an Augmented Reality experience for Meta Quest 3 in Unity, covering everything from project architecture to multiplayer networking with Photon Fusion 2, shared space localisation, accurate alignment of virtual content on the root sculpture, and a room-based system supporting multiple roles across facilitators and audience members.
As a Technical Artist I built two core systems: an interactive particle VFX that responded to audiences through hand tracking, and mycelium growth simulations created in Houdini FX with a custom Unity playback solution.
