Date 0:0

Date 0:0 is a participatory XR work by Wafaa Bilal and Sara Niroobakhsh about the date palm, one of the oldest cultivated trees in Mesopotamia, and the farms that were destroyed across the Iran-Iraq border during the war. Visitors plant virtual trees inside the work and place small physical ones on the gallery walls, contributing to a slow, collective replanting that runs across exhibitions, workshops, and lectures.

Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-American artist and NYU Tisch professor, a Creative Capital winner known for projects like Domestic Tension and …and Counting. Sara Niroobakhsh is an Iranian-Canadian artist and NYU Abu Dhabi faculty member working at the intersection of biotech, virtual reality, and interactive media. The work is theirs. My role is the XR engineer who builds it.

What I do on it

I lead development of the standalone Quest 3 build in Unity with the Meta XR SDK. The interesting parts are the transitions between the gallery you're standing in (Meta Passthrough MR) and the fully-immersive VR environments. Moving between them is the work's emotional pivot, so each handoff has to read as one continuous moment. The terrain is reconstructed from real satellite and elevation data of the border region, and the flora is procedurally generated and scattered onto it from that same data, so the environment you move through maps onto the actual place. Scene memory was a real constraint with the artists' 3D-scanned assets, so a chunk of the work has been getting it down ~60% while holding 90 FPS, plus getting concurrent headsets in a gallery to share state through a NoSQL backend so the planted trees persist between visitors.