Whisp
A calming, immersive space for honest self-reflection.
Skills
Unreal Engine, Arduino, Convai
Category
Master's Thesis Project
Date
Jul 25, 2025
INTRODUCTION
Most mental wellness tools assume you need fixing. Whisp doesn't work that way.
It's an immersive space where you can sit with your own thoughts and talk to an AI that actually just listens.
No goals you're supposed to hit. No progress bars watching you. No advice at the end. You just leave feeling a bit more like yourself.
STARTING POINT
Something I kept hearing was that real connection feels rare. Not for lack of people, but the relationships that exist don't quite land. Performative. Surface-level. Everyone showing up but nobody really there.
That bothered me more the longer I sat with it. If genuine connection is already this hard to find in a room full of people, what does solitude actually give you? Could it feel grounding instead of just hollow?
That question became Whisp.
EARLY EXPLORATION
The first version of Whisp was a glowing forest. I thought spectacle would pull people in. It did the opposite. People felt like they had to engage with something, wrestle it, earn their way through it, when the whole point was to not do that. The environment was working against itself.
Whisp didn't need to be impressive. It needed to get out of the way.
REDEFINING THE MOOD
The forest got scrapped. The new direction came from light artists: James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Chromasonic LA.
People who don't fill space, they shape it. Rooms built from color, not content.
Whisp evolved into four emotional spaces: Deep, Calm, Clear, Restoration
Each room uses subtle shifts in color and light to shape how a person feels. The goal was simple: create a space that feels soft, slow, and safe
BUILDING THE SYSTEM
ITERATION & FEEDBACK
The concept held. What changed was everything around it. Movement was too fast, so it got slowed down. People didn't know when to speak, so the prompts got clearer. Brian Eno's airport music came in late and quietly made every room feel more like itself. Small changes. But you felt every one of them.
FINAL EXPERIENCE
Sit. Talk. Reflect. Or don't do any of it. Whisp doesn't ask anything of you.
Whisp is live on itch.io for Windows
REFLECTION
Whisp taught me that you have to make the bad thing first. I spent a long time trying to start with the right idea. This project forced me to start with any idea and follow it until it broke, then follow the next one. The forest was wrong. The orb was wrong. But without them there are no rooms, no stillness, no Whisp. I stopped being afraid of making something unimpressive. That's when it actually became impressive.
