Worlds of Wellness

Inspiration

Approximately 80% of individuals in America live in cities or metropolitan environments, trading in the exposure to greenery and the beauty of nature for the more practical, industrial cityscape. However, much of the modern world struggles from anxiety, chronic stress, and an overall inability to relax and destress the mind. In addition, most research shows that the lack of natural structures and environments around many individuals in the modern world only exacerbates these mental problems.

While VR experiences for the different natural environments exist, we were unable to find an experience which truly takes advantage of nature and it's healing powers for the mind. Then, we have decided to curate a gallery of virtual experiences, inspired by natural phenomena, which stimulate the senses and immerse the user into the environment. These environments were designed in ways that we, as developers, felt would help users decompress, reminisce on nature, and become mentally refreshed.

What it does

Opening the project, you'll be greeted by a starting menu screen. From there, you can choose to navigate to a variety of different nature settings, such as a snowy mountain, a dense forest, or rolling hills and meadows. Once you select a setting, you will be placed into that natural environment, free to look all around the landscape and hear a rich plethora of sounds related to the environment. In addition to experiencing the nature, users could also utilize the application to help with serene imagery for exercises in mindfulness and meditation.

How we built it

Using Unity, we created a variety of different scenes, each of which corresponds to a different landscape. In each landscape, we used a variety of different tools like elevation brushes and textures to create more realistic terrains. In addition, we used the Tree Generation tool and corresponding shaders to generate trees for the forest, and then brushed those trees onto the landscape. We also included audio components to play sounds of the corresponding environment.

In the hub world, we created scripts which would read input from the VR controllers and respond accordingly to switch scenes.

As for resources, many of them were created by us. The starter pack and some assets were from the GTXR starter pack provided for the hackathon. Audio excerpts were from PixaBay, and assets which were not created by us were found for free on the Unity Asset Store.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was to balance the detail of our environments with the hardware capabilities of the Meta Quest headset. Sometimes, we would add too many trees, too much grass, or utilize complex physics to change the environment over time. This would slow down the headset and cause screen tearing. To solve this problem, we iteratively tested the scenes in the VR headset, adding and removing detail as necessary to pack as much realism into our scenes while maintaining usable performance on the headset. We also eliminated some extra physics (like wind), and incorporated 2.5D objects (drawing some things as 2D images while others render as 3D objects), into the scene.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first ever VR project, and none of us had very much experience with Unity. We're really happy to learn all about the development platform, and proud that we were able to create a fully functioning and usable project in such a short amount of time. We also really enjoyed our environment and scenery. We asked a few other individuals to try out the scenes, and most of them, unprompted, would tell us that they found the scenes very soothing and would love to just use it to have fun and unwind.

What we learned

We learned so much about Unity development in general, and especially about all of the different plug-ins, tools, and technologies available to developers for developing VR applications. We also learned a bit more on how to coordinate work. Throughout the project, we learned how to effectively divey up jobs to each teammate, and then combine all those ideas into the final product.

What's next for Worlds of Wellness

We have two ideas for next steps involving Worlds of Wellness:

1. While we did create a variety of different environments, users may know better on what types of environments they may want to immerse themselves into. If we were to extend this project, we would like to create a mode in which users could easily create their own landscapes simply within the VR application through picking-and-placing different elements in nature, such as trees, rocks, mountains, and hills. This would allow for even more customization and for users to create their own perfect VR nature experience.

2. Another next step to Worlds of Wellness would be to create even more, diverse landscapes for users to explore. However, after a certain amount of landscapes, it may be hard for users to navigate and choose for themselves an environment. We are looking to, in the future, query the user about their current mental state and use Emotion and Sentiment Analysis AI tools to give smart scene suggestions for users to try. Ideally, some scenes may help resolve different emotions better than others, and a smart suggestions tool would allow users to benefit from that.

Built With

• c#
• unity