My Roles: Project Manager, Developer, Artist
Tools: Unity, C#, Oculus Quest 2, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Notion - Agile working
Intro
As the project manager, I led a team of 6 in designing and developing isle - a VR app for young adults to build mental wellness practices through interactive mini-games. I managed our development and deliverable schedule within Notion; worked seamlessly between the development, design, and business strategy aspects of the project; and contributed heavily to the creative direction of the game while also filling in gaps on the development team.
Research
Our team began working on this project out of recognizing a cultural shift towards prioritizing mental well-being in recent years – specifically in the mainstream adoption of apps for mental health, adoption of emerging tech (VR) and tech-based solutions, and positive scientific results in using VR in medical research
Our goal was to create an immersive VR world for promoting mental well-being and relaxation, consisting of islands with different activities for expressing emotions, relieving stress, reflecting, finding calm, and experiencing joy.
Each isle serves as a solution to problems people are experiencing: feeling overwhelmed, restless, stressed, etc. People can go through isles linearly or non-linearly, based on their own preferences and needs at the moment.
Below is the concept art I drew in Adobe Photoshop.
isle of release
isle of calm
isle of reflection
progress checks
Ideation
Ultimately, we focused the most on isle of calm.
Some questions we asked ourselves during the design process included:
- What makes an environment calming and relaxing – but not boring?
- What is the ideal amount of time for someone to spend in each mini-world – balancing the engagement of our application while avoiding screen fatigue?
- What will keep players wanting to come back –without creating addictive feelings contrary to our mission?
In considering these questions and more, we settled on an immersive space environment where players can fly around in space collecting stars and watching shooting stars. The calming music and mock-infinite environment help players feel light and free, and collecting stars gives them a simple task to focus on as they take a step back from their lives.
To confirm our design choices, we conducted thorough playtests with 10+ students, following their experience using our application and making tweaks based on their collective feedback. The overall feedback was positive, and their input and critique allowed us to hone specific features such as the parameters and controller input for flying around, the interaction between the player and the stars, and the number of stars in the environment.
Reflection
While we were only able to complete one isle, I would love to be able to revisit this project and continue to build it out as a mental health tool. While we performed research on mental health related to VR application, it would be amazing to have a mental health expert on the team to ensure that we are headed in the right direction.
