For the Master course Designing Real Interactive Experiences, an experience had to be created to tackle an issue related to the limitations introduced by the Corona virus.
My project team chose to tackle the issue of the lack of intimacy, especially among loved ones that live apart and are not able to visit each other. By using the principles of research through design, we developed a Virtual Reality app for stargazing. Two users are connected and put in the same virtual environment, where intimacy is provoked by immersion and the illusion of proximity. This proximity is created by an additional layer of 3D audio, and the mood is set by a wide scene of stars and deeper questions to start a conversation, as well as a game-mode to find constellations to break the ice.
For this, we used the Google Cardboard and Unity to program the app. My task was to make the virtual reality element work on an Android phone, as well as accessing the phone’s camera and to detect whether the user is laying down or not. I also worked on styling the apps UI and designing the UX (specifically on a transition from the real world to the virtual world that is triggered when the user physically lays down).
The demo-app proved very successful and was appreciated by professors and experts. The concept was submitted to the VPRO Tegenlicht 2020 Pioneer contest (Dutch) and made it to the finals.