Summit

Summit was an early experiment in what VR could become for digital therapeutics. At the time, most VR healthcare work was rooted in academic and clinical prototypes — functionally interesting but limited in craft, aesthetic quality, and emotional engagement. Working with UnitedHealth’s digital therapeutics R&D group, we identified a set of psychological interventions well suited to immersive media. Summit served as both a proving ground for those ideas and a way to explore how thoughtful design could elevate the experiential quality of wellness in VR.

The Problems We Had to Solve

Characters felt unsettling, not supportive.

Human-like characters landed in the uncanny valley and felt threatening in close proximity. The initial story relied on familiar tropes that lacked emotional depth, undermining the sense of safety we needed to build.

VR was treated like a 2D medium.

Activities felt like traditional flat-screen mechanics dropped into 3D space. Motion design didn’t account for VR sensitivity, and interaction systems were overly complex for first-time users.

Player agency wasn’t respected.

Important moments were easy to overlook. Scene layouts didn’t account for how users move and explore in 3D space, leading to missed experiences.

The world felt fragmented.

Rather than a cohesive place, the experience felt like disconnected activities tied only by location.

Controls lacked consistency.

Interaction schemes changed across activities, breaking immersion — especially for inexperienced users.

A New Creative Foundation

At a certain point, it became clear the project needed more than iteration — it needed a new foundation.

We moved away from human characters to something emotionally safer: small, simple, intentionally non-human forms that became the Boops. When our external partners couldn’t support this shift, I made the call to build an internal creative studio and took on both character and world design — refining the Boops, shaping their environment, and rewriting the story to support a gentler, more purposeful experience.

Boop concept with dwelling

Designing for First-Time VR Users

I assumed many users would enter the experience without a background in games — strangers in a strange land.

Rather than relying on familiar conventions, I designed the experience to teach through context and behavior. The Boops communicate through gesture, and a narrator appears only briefly to introduce the essentials before receding into the story.

Most importantly, I treated common game mechanics not as assumptions, but as things that needed to be gently introduced. Ideas like progression, collection, and unlocking — second nature to experienced players — were embedded directly into the world so inexperienced users could build their understanding naturally, without ever feeling like they were being taught how to play.

Boops teaching by demonstrating

Reimagining Interaction in 3D

One early activity, a cognitive bias modification exercise, originally resembled a word search with spoken instructions. It felt contrived and cognitively heavy.

I redesigned the experience around discovery instead of instruction:

Replaced positive words with symbols (happy faces)
Removed all explicit instructions
Embedded the mechanic directly into the world

Players encounter Boops planting flowers with faces that detach and drift toward them. Touching a happy face triggers positive audio and visual feedback, and the Boops collect it into a basket. After ten happy faces are gathered, the Boops celebrate and unlock the next part of the experience.

Rather than being told what to do, users learn by experimenting — finding success through trial, error, and response. The activity becomes instruction, reinforcement, and narrative progression all at once, allowing understanding to emerge naturally instead of being imposed.

Cognitive bias modification exercise

Making the World Feel Whole

Every required action had to belong in the world.

I introduced a series of Boop technologies — devices that required user participation to activate. One of the most important centered on breathing.

Using a chest-strap input device, players synced real breathing with glowing Boop breathing stones. A large stone door, for example, could only be opened by matching three breaths to the stone. Breathing stopped being abstract and became a physical, story-embedded action.

Environmental gating logic

Boop tech concepts with breathing stones — embedding core mechanics into world logic

Respecting Player Agency

I redesigned scene layouts around what players needed to experience versus what could be discovered later. Critical moments were clearly signaled through audio and visual cues. Progression-essential activities were gated. Optional content used subtle gaze-based triggers. Details were layered so repeat playthroughs revealed more than the first.

The result was an experience where the user became a fluid part of the design system — not just a visitor.

Simplifying Control for Immersion

Three principles guided interaction design:

No special cases — a button always did the same thing.
Accessibility first. Interaction design was guided by extensive user testing with first-time and non-technical VR users across multiple age groups. Through playtesting, surveys, and direct observation — including sessions with seniors encountering VR for the first time. We learned that simplicity and consistency mattered more than feature depth.
The control scheme was built to minimize cognitive friction, letting users stay present in the experience rather than thinking about how to operate it.
No HUD. Immersion came from removing gamified visual clutter. Users should feel they are in another world, not a game.

Inventory moved to the user’s hands. Tools were embedded into gloves. Controller beams were replaced with subtle object highlighting. The result was a control scheme that felt consistent, learnable, and quietly supportive.

Glove controlled inventory

Outcome

Summit became the foundation for our internal studio and a proof point for how careful immersive design could support psychological intervention in ways that feel human, safe, and emotionally grounded.

What began as a struggling prototype became an experiential framework that shaped everything that followed.