VRZen

Developed by Insiyah Jawadwala, Elizaveta Kravchenko, and Divya Mirchandani as the final project for Introduction to Virtual Environments (INF 385T) at The University of Texas at Austin, Fall 2021.

Overview

With the current state of the world layered on the intense pressures of attending a higher learning institution, university students are experiencing an increased need for their schools' already overstressed psychological support services.

VRZen aims to foster a calming space specifically designed for students, ultimately including:

1. Refuge in the form of a virtual space available 24/7
2. Peer support from other students using the app at their university
3. Virtually guided meditation and mindfulness exercises
4. Compiled resources for further self-care, in VR and beyond.

This prototype is a first step in addressing student need while reducing reliance on physical university spaces. The project aims to fill the support gap between contacting university mental health services and attending the first appointment, although the platform has potential to be used indefinitely.

Watch the demo walkthru (winter wonderland meditation area)

Elizaveta's Contribution Statement

While I had the initial idea for this application (intending from the very beginning to target the mental health needs of college students), my teammates and I collaborated on fine tuning the essential conceptual elements of the application. This included developing concepts for the main social space/waiting room, introducing an emotional support animal to the space in the form of an embodied agent, and the "step into a painting" mechanism to transport a user to a new meditative environment.  

My specific contributions to the demo include:

• constructing/designing the waiting room and quiet room scenes
• designing the portal mechanisms and connecting the outside meditative environments
• setting up the movement of and interactions with the NPC support animal
• mocking up UI elements to provide further information on proposed features
• integrating all scenes for Oculus Quest, including grabbing capabilities 
• capturing footage of the project for the promotional video using Unity Timeline
• conceptualizing additional avenues for demo expansion, including a "take a sweet/leave a sweet" feature (where students can leave audio notes for one another attached to a piece of candy)