What shrine is
shrine is a research-led autobiographical memory system for people whose lives unfold across cultures, languages, and places.
It enables people to capture small memory fragments (moments, conversations, impressions, questions) and hold them within a private space designed for reflection over time.
shrine uses human-centered AI and immersive media to support sense-making across layers such as time, place, emotion, and cultural context, allowing an autobiographical world to gradually take shape.
why shrine exists
Some lives leave no single place where memory can settle.
For individuals living between cultures, languages, and social worlds, memory often becomes dispersed. Experiences accumulate across places and phases of life, while the contexts that once held them fade, change, or disappear.
Over time, this can make it harder to carry a coherent sense of self, belonging, and continuity. Personal history risks becoming fragmented, not because it lacks meaning, but because it has no dedicated space to be held with care.
shrine exists to explore how technology can support this kind of lived complexity. Grounded in principles of digital humanism and value-based engineering, the project investigates how human-centered AI and immersive media can help people preserve, reflect on, and make sense of lives shaped across cultures.
Personal history risks becoming fragmented because it has no dedicated space to be held with care.
HOW SHRINE WORKS
A system for holding memory over time
For individuals living between cultures, languages, and social worlds, memory often becomes dispersed. Experiences accumulate across places and phases of life, while the contexts that once held them fade, change, or disappear.
Over time, this can make it harder to carry a coherent sense of self, belonging, and continuity. Personal history risks becoming fragmented, not because it lacks meaning, but because it has no dedicated space to be held with care.
shrine exists to explore how technology can support this kind of lived complexity. Grounded in principles of digital humanism and value-based engineering, the project investigates how human-centered AI and immersive media can help people preserve, reflect on, and make sense of lives shaped across cultures.
how shrine becomes spatial
An autobiographical world takes shape
As fragments accumulate, shrine does not arrange them as a feed or a list.
Instead, memories begin to form a spatial autobiographical world — one that reflects how experiences relate across time, place, emotion, and cultural context.
This world is not fixed or linear. It grows unevenly, with areas of density, distance, and quiet, allowing people to return, reflect, and recognize patterns in their own lived history.
Spatial and immersive media are used to support orientation, memory, and meaning without forcing structure onto experience.