MemorialCCM
A virtual reality memorial of Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Mexico City campus before the September 19 earthquake, pitched as an immersive way to preserve place, memory, and student identity.
Reference
me·mo·ri·al
məˈmôrēəl/ noun
something, especially a structure, established to remind people of a person or event.
01 — Context
MemorialCCM began with a simple question from the pitch: what is a memorial? The project treated a memorial as a structure that helps people remember a person, an event, or a place — and asked what it meant to be a CCM student after the physical campus had changed. The presentation framed the campus as more than buildings. It asked how space affects students and professors, and how an immersive environment could help a community revisit the places, rituals, and everyday landmarks that had shaped their identity.
02 — Brief & Constraints
Create an immersive VR walkthrough that commemorated Tec CCM through experience rather than documentation alone. The goal was to revive the campus atmosphere through an artistic proposal: to let people walk through a remembered version of the school, recognize familiar spaces, and feel the continuity of a place that had been interrupted by the earthquake. The pitch positioned virtual reality not as the opposite of the real, but as an updated reality — a way to make memory tangible and accessible again.
03 — Approach
I pitched the concept to a committee of professors after the idea circulated informally among faculty, then led a fourteen-person team through pre-production, production, and post-production. The work combined concept development, team coordination, experience design, programming, and scene building. A donated set of 1:1 architectural models became the technical starting point; from there, the team focused on reconstructing the emotional details of campus life.
01
The pitch opened with the dictionary idea of a memorial: a structure created to remind people of a person or an event.
02
From there, the question became spatial and emotional: what does it mean to be a CCM student, and how does space affect students and professors?
03
The project framed virtual reality not as the opposite of the real, but as an updated reality: a way to make memory tangible again.
August
Pre-production
- Scouting, photographs, architectural plans, testimony documentation, and permissions.
- The material was translated into a digital map, a route sketch, and a shared visual language for navigation.
- Reference VR and mobility research helped define how people would walk, pause, and recognize the campus.
September — October
Production
- 3D models, UV maps, illustrated textures, textured assets, and Unity tests formed the production backbone.
- The environment included buildings, trees, sculptures, chess pieces, the cenote, benches, signs, and everyday campus markers.
- Programming focused on navigation, behavior, sensitive portals, walking, selecting, and action events.
November
Post-production
- Unity integration, usability testing, evaluation, reprogramming, build, and final delivery.
- The final presentation connected creative concept, visual communication, and a website into one deliverable.
- Role map: Art, Compositing, Modeling, and Programming.
04 — Final Product
05 — Fun facts
Interesting to look back after eight years: this was not only a VR production, but a leadership exercise in turning grief, donated technical assets, and collective memory into an experience people could enter together.
- 01
The project reached the faculty committee almost accidentally: professors overheard the idea in the faculty dining room and asked for a presentation on how the team would be led and how production would work.
- 02
A Computer Graphics professor had been working on flow simulations before the earthquake and already had 1:1 building models with more realistic textures, which he donated to the project.
- 03
That is why the buildings look more realistic than the rest of the environment: the team started from donated architectural models and focused its energy on rebuilding the emotional details of campus life.
- 04
The real brief became memory: benches, statues, signs, small landmarks, and the feeling of being back at the school before the earthquake.
- 05
At the final fair, two VR consoles ran in parallel. Students and professors used the experience, many cried, and several thanked the team for giving them a way to return to a campus that had been home for 10–20 years.