Cronus Throne is a headset-based, room-scale Mixed Reality artwork in a 3×3 m space. A real mirror, two virtual mirrors, a transparent clock, and a rocking throne create a hybrid room—part real, part virtual—where the player explores how time and self-perception can be altered. Built in Unreal Engine for advanced MR headsets, it’s an intimate, one-person, meditative experience.
The room begins in balance. Touching the clock disrupts it: one virtual mirror reverses your movements, the other flips your image; the clock may spin the wrong way. Each interaction affects multiple elements, so the player walks, observes, and uses hand gestures to learn the hidden dependencies. The goal is to bring all reflections back to real-time and re-align the clock. When harmony returns, the virtual layers fade; in the physical mirror, the throne appears occupied by Cronus, the god of time.
Cronus Throne is an interdisciplinary R&D project which stages a dialogue between presence and projection. Seeing your real reflection alongside altered doubles reveals that “now” is something the mind assembles from sight, action, and delay.
This practical study on time and cognition explores how a mirror delays, flips, or reverses, impacting your perception, which tries to keep control by predicting what should happen next. The interruption in your predictions sharpens your attention for a moment, your sense of agency wobbles, and you physically re-time your movements to match the altered feedback. That simple effort of reaching, waiting, and adjusting, teaches you that “real-time” is not fixed; it is something your mind builds from sight, sound, and action.
As players restore the room, they feel how technology can bend duration and, with it, their identity is an inviting reflection on control, agency, and who we are when our feedback loops shift and what is present when there is no interval of true memories!
"Magic Mirror" is the first public slice of my MR escape-room project, the "Cronus Throne"—while it stands on its own as an AI-driven artwork. It’s a real-time, webcam-driven mirror that lets you bend what you see: reverse the timeline, flip the image, swap faces, and stylise the whole frame with one touch. As you play, a parallel you appears—still tethered to your body, yet refusing perfect obedience. It lags and invents its own gestures. Magic Mirror exposes how fragile “now” is: the moment you can edit your reflection, presence becomes a choice. What happens when the person in the mirror is you, and not you, at the same time?
Mixed Reality Scape Room, "Cronus Throne"
Developed in Unreal Engine, the project uses spatial mapping and passthrough to anchor virtual objects to real walls, with hand-tracking for embodied interaction. The current prototype includes a working virtual mirror with toggleable modes (real-time, flip, reverse).
Next stages integrate real-time volumetric capture or headset avatars (Vision Pro Persona) so players confront a live 3D “mirror self” that’s slightly out of sync.
UE Plugin, “Cronus”:
a production-ready Unreal Engine 5 plugin for live time control and stream-ready capture.
Core features:
1. In-memory ring buffer for record / pause / reverse / scrub / speed ramp during play; time-shifted picture-in-picture; mirror states (flip, delay, reverse) as Blueprint nodes.
2. APIs & workflow: Blueprint + C++ API, sample level, and presets; bridge to ComfyUI for light AI stylisation (motion trails, soft morphs).
3. Target Devices: Meta Quest (OpenXR) and desktop UE builds; stream-friendly outputs via Mixed Reality Capture (Quest) and NDI/desktop capture for PC.
