Zeppelin Universität · Virtual Spaces · Spring Semester 2026

The VR Confessional

A contemplative social VR space for stress relief, designed around the praxis of confession.

Jonathan Brandes · Levi Dal Canton

Demo & Project Submission · 4 May 2026

Course Instructor · Özgür Eren

§ 1 Personas

Who is the space designed for?

Primary audience: students at Zeppelin Universität, especially those carrying acute or chronic stress.

Lena

22 · Master's student · pre-thesis

"I don't want to dump on my friends again — but I need to say it out loud."

Acute, recurring stress. Wants a low-friction outlet she can return to whenever the pressure builds.

Jonas

26 · Doctoral candidate · second year

"It's been a strange year. I just want a place that doesn't ask me to perform."

Chronic isolation. Wants quiet presence — not advice, not solutions, just being heard.

§ 2 Why a confessional?

Why a confessional?

Disclosure benefits from scaffolding. Pennebaker's expressive-disclosure paradigm shows measurable stress-reduction effects from articulating difficult experiences. A blank chat box is high-friction; a ritualised setting lowers the cost of starting.
Less judgment, more disclosure. Lucas et al. find that perceived AI listeners reduce social-evaluation anxiety and increase willingness to disclose — directly applicable to our agent.
Confession is a cross-cultural form. The act of speaking to an unseen, attentive listener appears in many traditions. The form is recognisable; the onboarding cost is low.

Cultural framing. The praxis is borrowed; the religion is not. The space is a temple — open to all — rather than a church. The agent's avatar reads as religious without belonging to any one tradition.

§ 3 The Communication Task

What kind of communication does this space support?

A private, voice-based dialogue between a single user and a non-judgmental listener inside a contemplative virtual environment.

Modality. Voice in / voice out. The user speaks aloud; the listener responds aloud.
Privacy. Per-user memory with the listener; no recording; voices contained to the booth.
Listener. An AI agent or, equivalently, another human session participant — the role is portable.

Theoretical grounding: Pennebaker (1997) on the therapeutic effect of disclosure; Lucas et al. (2014) on reduced disclosure inhibition with virtual humans. See §5.

§ 4 Design Decisions

Why the room feels the way it does.

A temple, not a church.

The praxis of confession is a cross-cultural form of disclosure. We borrowed the practice but not the religion, so the architectural shell is a non-denominational temple. The agent's avatar follows the same logic — religious in feel, unplaceable in tradition.

Dim, warm light.

Cool or bright lighting reads as clinical or public. Warm low-key light cues "private, slow, evening" — the conditions under which honest speech is easier.

A curtain at the threshold.

A ritual needs a marked entry. The curtain physically separates "in the room" from "in the world," so crossing it is felt as a transition, not a click.

A holdable candle.

A small object for the hands lets the mind settle. The candle also gives the user a measure of agency over the light — the only changeable thing in the room.

GenericMovable over Animator.

An Animator-based curtain proved fragile in ENGAGE — Inspector edits don't fire state listeners; triggers fire on load. A direct lerp via NetworkStateTrigger_GenericMovable between two sibling position markers was more robust and easier to debug.

ENGAGE-native seat, not custom XR.

Generic Unity XR Interaction Toolkit components are stripped by the ENGAGE pipeline. Using the SDK's own seat keeps multi-user sync working and avoids fighting the platform.

A side-table for the candle.

When the user teleports onto the booth seat, hand state doesn't carry. Adding a small table next to the seat lets the user deliberately set the candle down first — agency rather than abrupt loss.

Voice in / voice out.

Text inputs in VR break presence. Voice keeps the modality continuous with the rest of the experience and matches the real-world act of speaking aloud.

§ 5 References

References

Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166.
Lucas, G. M., Gratch, J., King, A., & Morency, L.-P. (2014). It's only a computer: Virtual humans increase willingness to disclose. Computers in Human Behavior, 37, 94–100.

§ 6 Team & Process

How the two of us worked.

Area	Work
Environment	Sourced and integrated a temple model from Sketchfab; baked dim warm lighting; placed ambient candles.
Booth	Built the confessional structure inside the temple, with lattice between the two sides and a table on the visitor's side.
Curtain	Implemented as NetworkStateTrigger_GenericMovable with a proximity trigger zone; abandoned the Animator-based approach after debugging revealed it was fragile in ENGAGE.
Holdable candle	Network Object pattern with light component; added the side-table for candle drop-off prior to teleport.
AI agent	Configured in ENGAGE: voice in / voice out, per-user memory, non-denominational avatar.
Presentation	This deck, deployed at confessionary.kanonindustries.com and opened on the in-world ENGAGE browser.

Working pattern: at every step one of us was researching while the other was deploying — then we swapped. Same room, same screen, two pairs of hands moving in turn. Each row above was touched by both of us at different points.

Thank you. Questions welcome — and afterwards, the room.