Interactive Narrative - May 2025
OVERVIEW
The Diner is a project created for the online component of (Against) Transience, an exhibition of works by students in the Collaborative Intermedia Studio at Trinity College Dublin. Its content and interaction mechanisms are inspired by feelings of placelessness, memories of home, and the closing of a beloved diner in Los Angeles.
The project was created using Three.js.
CONCEPT
The Diner plays with the notion of transience framed by experiences with the Pantry, a diner in LA open for over 100 years. Up until the pandemic, the Pantry had never shut its door. In 2025, it shut its doors permanently.
Clicking on each of the photos in the 3D space reveals short texts centered on memories of the diner - ordering food, sitting with family, encountering the restaurant for the first time. This process of engagement is a necessarily destructive act - each time a photo is clicked, it disappears. It is only once all of them are cleared from the screen that new memories appear, and the narrative progresses.
LESSONS LEARNED
Optimizing Performance: the bloom filter adds a dreamy quality to the experience, but because it re-renders every frame, it kills the performance on most computers. Given the limited timeline for creating this project there wasn't much to be done about this, but in future iterations I hope to re-implement this in a way that balances impact and performance.
Simplify, then Add Complexity Later: Having less than a week to complete the project, I began building the simplest possible structure for the 3D space, with intentions of adding more detail as time progressed. Ultimately I found that the more abstract approach worked better than trying to overload the project with unnecessary details.
Every Project is a Compromise: I'd considered many different ways of creating a project responding to these themes, including a gesture-based interactive experience and a text-based work of interactive fiction which decayed over time.
What drove me to choose this approach was less about it being undeniably the best option, and more because of how it would lend itself to the constraints of the exhibition and method of display.
What drove me to choose this approach was less about it being undeniably the best option, and more because of how it would lend itself to the constraints of the exhibition and method of display.
NEXT STEPS
The Diner was, first and foremost, a prototype. It was always intended to be a small, experimental project exploring a new library I hadn't worked with before. All this to say, any discussion of next steps should recognize that it has served its purpose, and there's greater benefit to applying what I've learned here to a new project than endlessly tweaking this one.
For one, this project inspired me to learn more about React Three Fiber, to see how it simplifies the workflow for this type of piece.
If I were to change anything, I would (1) replace the photos with something less direct and more personally meaningful, and (2) modify the navigation controls - a risk with the current implementation is that in clicking around the space, users might accidentally click into a photo they weren't paying attention to yet.