anchorVR.

Inspiration

VR headsets are becoming as common as smartphones but nobody is talking about what happens to your brain when you spend hours living in a virtual world. We came across research showing that just 30 minutes of VR can trigger depersonalization and derealization, that eerie feeling of watching yourself from outside your body, or the real world feeling slightly fake.

We asked ourselves: if billions of people are about to have two identities: one virtual, one physical. What happens to the one who has to live in the real world? That question became anchorVR.

What it does

anchorVR is a speculative tool that tracks, measures, and restores your felt sense of being grounded in physical reality. It runs as a real-time overlay inside your VR headset, monitoring biometric and behavioral signals to compute a live DISSOCIATION PERCENTAGE. When your score drops below a threshold, it gently intervenes with breathing exercises, movement prompts, and grounding cues without yanking you out of the experience. Everything is tracked in a companion mobile app.

How we built it

We approached this as a speculative design challenge grounded in real neuroscience. We mapped the experience across two interfaces an in-VR overlay and a mobile companion app. Our design process centered on the question: how do you intervene without disrupting, and inform without overwhelming?

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was designing for something invisible. Presence is felt, not seen and translating that into a measurable, actionable interface without trivializing the experience was a constant tension. We also had to think carefully about safeguards: a tool that monitors dissociation could easily become a tool that causes anxiety about dissociation. Striking that balance, empowering without alarming, shaped every design decision.

What we learned

Humans have far more than five senses, and most of them are completely undesigned for. The "quantified self" space has barely scratched the surface of what's measurable. We learned that the most meaningful tools aren't the ones that show you the most data they're the ones that know when and how to surface it.