Beyond Wing Wor is a memorial to Ralston Louie's quest to discover elements of his Chinese heritage that he could fuse with his American identity to create a more authentic and universal work. Ralston, a student in the USC Games program, was working day and night on his VR thesis project in 2020 when he lost his life in a breathtaking accident. After the first shock, his family, friends, colleagues, and instructors from USC decided to come together and finish his student project. For more information regarding this tragic event and the birth of this project, you can visit: here and here.

Wing Wor was Ralston’s vision for his thesis project. Ralston was driven by his personal quest to explore his Chinese heritage, and his values of honoring his family. 

The broader motivation behind Ralston’s greater body of work was to share personal narratives, promote cultural exchange and reduce stigma. He believed that virtual reality as an embodied medium was capable of changing people’s minds and hearts, and that interactivity could enable participants to explore with their body and enact behaviors that could transfer beyond the virtual world

Inspired by Ralston’s vision and legacy his family and friends are on a mission to create a “town square” space that will build a community with similar interests and values. The platform will support artists to develop immersive, culturally significant work through grants and residencies. Beyond Wing Wor will be an immersive, Metaverse based on Wing Wor's digital twin, where artists create and share work.  Beyond Wing Wor will foster a participatory process for proposing, creating, producing, and promoting work and move beyond the limitations of our initial vision. While we are very much interested in projects that explore Asian-American connections, we are open to all explorations of identity, family, and nation that can promote conversations of healing.  

For its first project, Beyond Wing selected the talented young VR director Awu Chen, a dear friend and collaborator to Ralston at USC, to complete Ralston's work, the Wing Wor VR experience. Their intimate friendship, shared values, curiosity, and similar work styles made Awu the ideal candidate to finish what Ralston left behind.