Wing Wor reminds us of the intimacy of exposing our identity through art and building bridges through cultural exchange and values in a quest for authenticity.
Wing Wor is a legacy project for the Louie family. Centering around photographer Reagan Louie’s trips to his ancestral home of Wing Wor, the narrative game tells a multigenerational story of immigration, searching for your place in the world, and meaning of family. The project was initially started as a USC MFA thesis project by Ralston Louie, whose life was tragically cut short. Now, the Wing Wor team is completing the project, and with it preserving the legacy of the Louie family and Ralston’s memory.
Ralston and Reagan traveled to Wing Wor in 2019 to collect the stories and photography, which form the basis of the photogrammetry immersive experience. Ralston’s motivation for creating Wing Wor was to inspire others to explore their ancestral identity and family histories.
Ralston Louie (1992-2021)
Ralston Peregrine Louie was born July 22, 1992, in San Francisco, making him a sixth-generation Californian. Two months after he was born, the family moved to Piedmont where he grew up on sports and museums, owing to his father, a longtime professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Wing Wor was initially started as a USC MFA thesis project by Ralston Louie, whose life was tragically cut short. Now, the Wing Wor team is completing the project, and with it preserving the legacy of the Louie family and Ralston’s memory.
Our Team is on a mission to complete Ralston's unfinished work, maintain an immersive, Metaverse platform based on Wing Wor's digital twin and continuously support artists with similar interests and values to develop immersive, culturally significant work
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Founder
Reagan Louie is an internationally recognized photographer. His work is collected and exhibited in museums such as; MOMA, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Gwangju Biennale. His first book on China, “Toward a Truer Life” was named the photography book of the year by the New York Times. Reagan’s journeys to China were the inspiration for Ralston’s Wing Wor VR project. He has worked closely with the team to help shape the narrative arc of the experience.
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Immersive Media Director
Awu Chen graduated from the USC Interactive Media & Games program where he met Ralston while developing Ama’s Momento. Ama’s Momento was Awu’s personal VR project dedicated to preserving his grandma’s life story as a Taiwanese art collector. Ralston and Awu bonded over their shared interest in using VR to preserve personal stories. Ralston became a developer on the project and worked with Awu to finish the project which won the IndieCade 2019 award. Awu then went on to produce Dear Mom which won BAFTAs immersive media award in 2020. Awu now leads the team creating Wing Wor.
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Design Researcher
Marientina Gotsis is Professor of Practice at USC and director of the Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center. Motivated by his grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer's, Ralston was interested in health applications for VR. He studied with Marientina, and she eventually became a mentor for Wing Wor.
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Advisory Committee Lead
Vangelis Lympouridis is the founder of Enosis, a design innovation studio known for producing the Bohemian Rhapsody VR experience for Google and Queen and working on immersive R&D projects with clients such as Deloitte, HP Labs, LSE, AppliedVR, JPL-NASA, and others. Lympouridis taught the AR/VR and Mixed Reality course at the Viterbi School of Engineering, where he met and supervised Ralston first as a student and later as a teaching assistant to the same class. He mentored Ralston during his thesis project and lent him the Lidar system to scan the Wing Wor village in China. He is the lead advisor on the project.
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The Studio
AmaVR is a collective of immersive media storytellers dedicated to remembering moments that keep us together, even when we are apart. The group was founded in 2017 while creating Ama’s Momento, a mixed reality exhibit preserving the grandmother of co-founder Awu Chen. A project Ralston was deeply involved with. Since then, their work has been recognized by the LA Times as “heart-achingly thoughtful”, earned them nominations for prestigious awards such as BAFTA, and gain distribution from Meta.
Members: Awu Chen, Lizzy Hogenson, Nicholas Pudjarminta, Kevin Wu, Steven Harmon, Zong Chiang, Fernando Cabrera.
