A Day's Blur VR

A simulated caregiver gives instructions to a VR user simulating the world of unreliable memory experienced by Alzheimer's patients.
A Day's Blur VR contains systematically-designed features and a story loop to provide an immersive, interactive experiential learning sim.
Bedroom
Models Building
Kitchen

Inspiration

Early diagnosis and intervention is key to supporting the quality of life for those with Alzheimer’s, but sadly, 7 in 10 people diagnosed with dementia say they wish they had known it earlier to start treatment promptly. So, it’s important to know the symptoms. We already have many videos and articles to help us learn about Alzheimer through traditional media forms. But an immersive and interactive experience has more potential to be visceral and memorable.

What it does

The app we developed provides a novel take on the use of VR and the experiential learning simulation. One user goes through a VR simulation of an Alzheimer’s patient going through tasks in a world where memory is not reliable. Normal objects become unrecognizable as your grasp on reality fades and help is needed for the user to remember their daily tasks. The other user acts outside of the headset using an asymmetric display of the world to guide the VR user through the tasks. This caregiver user sees a “normal” view of the world via the PC monitor of the same system the VR headset is being run on, but as they try to guide the Alzheimer’s patient to do simple tasks like “eat an apple”, the Alzheimer’s patient struggles to see the same objects that the caregiver does. To the patient, the apple is an unrecognizable blob. Their memory of even basic concepts like food is failing them, and that can be frustrating. We will use our app to acknowledge that frustration and support a healthier connection to the reality of the disease so that caregivers know better what the Alzheimer’s experience feels like.

How we built it

We build our project using the Meta presence platform, and we used Bezi for asset modeling.

Challenges we ran into

This has been an educational experience for all of us. Many of us on the team were new to XR but we were passionate and willing to learn. The Meta presence platform required a bit of learning curve, which was our main obstacle on day 1. On day2, we faced a lot of difficulties transporting Bezi models to unity.