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Conceived by VR artist Benedict Yu alongside BA Arts Management students, Echoes of the Bay is a flagship participatory VR installation produced by LASALLE’s Culture Futures Lab to commemorate Singapore’s 60th anniversary. Supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth's Our Singapore Fund and key cultural partners, the project empowered local multicultural communities as co-creators. Through participatory workshops, sixty personal migration narratives were translated into 3D digital vessels floating within a virtual archipelago. Reaching over 500 visitors at the Singapore Night Festival and Singapore Design Week, this living archive inspired real-time audience contributions. The project gained swift international acclaim, presented at the 2025 Meaningful XR Conference at UC Davis and the 12th International Digital Storytelling Conference in São Paulo. Taking the global stage at the 2026 Ars Electronica Festival, Echoes of the Bay earned a prestigious Honorable Mention in the Campus Exhibition at the University of Arts Linz. Aligning with the festival’s theme, NEGOTIATING HUMANITY, the installation utilized a triple-modality architecture—combining a Virtual Archipelago, an interactive Shipyard, and physical "Letter Boats" with handwritten reflections—to reclaim digital tools for empathy, minoritized knowledge, and communal meaning-making.
Among the flagship demos, in 2026 Associate Professor Natalia Grincheva delivered a landmark demonstration of the Culture in SDG Observatory app at the Decision Making Theatre. Convening executive leaders and policy-makers from across the Asia Pacific region, the session offered participants a transformative vision for measuring culture’s role in global sustainable development. Addressing severe data vacuums and resource constraints in UNESCO’s Culture | 2030 Indicators, Prof. Grincheva demonstrated how the Data To Power application leverages open-source proxies, satellite imagery, and AI-driven analytics to quantify cultural vitality across four key domains: Environment & Resilience, Prosperity & Livelihood, Knowledge & Skills, and Inclusion & Participation. To translate these complex data models into Lived Lived experiences, the demonstration paired predictive intelligence with four creative digital installations—spanning VR environmental dance, graphic novels on urban displacement, 3D walking simulators of memory maps, and neural-interface robotic painting for adaptive accessibility. Through interactive speculative design sprints, regional policy-makers and executive leaders prototyped future development scenarios, discovering firsthand how AI-enabled cultural analytics can move global governance from passive reporting to active, evidence-based strategic statecraft.