Rogier
Sluijter

GRIMM is an AR experience for 72 simultaneous visitors on stage, wearing XR glasses and moving through an immersive world alongside live performers, with the physical set expanded in XR. It uses fairytales the way we always have, telling lessons through stories, to explore present-day insights about our online era. For this graduation project I designed one full act of the show. In my chapter the witch is the scapegoat: her story has been rewritten by AI into fake news, stripping away the nuance that once made her the hero. You help her during a live attack by the Brothers Grimm, setting off with a physical basket that works as a phygital object, interacting with the world around you. Hans & Gretel are reimagined as algorithmic seduction: hand-tracked and controller-free, you bounce digital cookies back into the witch's cauldron using only your hands. I took it from first concept to a working prototype.

A mixed-reality theatre experience at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, telling the history of LGBTQIA+ emancipation in the Netherlands. The early prototype was built entirely around storytelling through spatial audio, guiding you through handcrafted scenarios and soundscapes. During my specialisation I built the first Unity prototype along with six other concrete concepts, and I was later brought onto the real production: editing and timing two chapters, placing content in the virtual space and supporting the live shows throughout the run. The final version grew beyond sound alone, weaving in rare archive footage of Dutch queer history that had never been shown to the public before.

A point-cloud installation (with Mayté & Laura, SPACEFX Studios) inspired by Aliona Kardash's photograph 'It Smells of Smoke at Home'. Through guided narration and an immersive environment built with Kinect v2 and spatial audio, the visitor moves through arrival, connection, reflection and release, a space to confront the emotional residue left when a connection quietly dissolves, and to leave a little lighter.

An open brief to explore the immersive field, which I took as a chance to build a full projection-mapping installation on my own. Projected onto a corner wall so that two panes meet as the windows of a submarine, it takes you down to the bottom of the Sea of Ideas. Where the class mapped the immersive landscape from above, I followed my love for marine life and dove to the seabed instead. Where do ideas come from? In this world they are a natural phenomenon, born in the deep as a by-product of a living creature. Every idea forms in these waters, and only the ones that rise to the surface reach someone's mind. Some thinkers suggest that ideas are never truly ours: they are a collective, passing through countless minds before one person finally acts on them and brings them to life. Concept, 3D and projection all self-made, in a two-week sprint.

An audiovisual installation about the drifting inner world, and watching your thoughts pass by without being carried away with them. A projected aquarium becomes the mind: a school of digital fish as looping thoughts, with neural forms grown in TouchDesigner. The idea at its heart: you are not your thoughts. Like waves, they come and go, and you set them adrift. Made in a short two to three day sprint.

An abstract audiovisual piece on the quiet ache of becoming: the slow reshaping of the self, and the fragile beauty that emerges from what has been broken. Growth can ache. It can stretch you into shapes that hurt and make you want to break. Each step is a small act of courage, to finally bloom in the end. Built in Blender, in a short two to three day sprint.