 In My Shoes VR Experience

Summary of Brief:

Create a means of helping clinicians attending a congress to understand the world through the eyes of their patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), building empathy by demonstrating the true impact of the condition in everyday situations.

What we did:

• Identified that we needed to construct a story that resonated at emotional and rational levels to challenge perceptions and drive support and understanding.
• Recommended a VR experience that would give clinicians the opportunity to physically and mentally step into the shoes of their patients — to experience their day; meet their family, friends, colleagues; take on their challenges; hear their thoughts; see what they see… all with breath-taking clarity.
• Designed and produced three immersive scenarios to be viewed in succession using VR technology. The main objective was to bring to life the ‘typical’ symptoms of ADHD in the situations where the condition most impacts patients’ lives — the scenarios serving to highlight the everyday challenges affecting the different age groups.
• Presented the symptoms of ADHD in first person perspective in each scenario, putting the viewer in the shoes of a child, an adolescent and an adult with ADHD and allowing them to experience the symptoms first hand — and hear the main characters’ inner voices as they expressed their thoughts.
• Developed the content in collaboration with psychiatrists, HCPs and ADHD patients to ensure accuracy, authenticity and authority.
• Utilised surround sound as a means of adding to the end user’s sense of immersion, with sound ‘cues’ directing their attention in the correct direction and allowing us to guide them — effectively pausing the feature until the viewer had seen the appropriate part of the narrative that allowed the story to continue.
• Designed, built and stability tested the hardware to be used onsite, whilst the 3D content was in development.
• Tested the content on the hardware at regular intervals throughout the development process to ensure we achieved the best balance of image quality, high frame rate and low latency (the lag between a viewer’s head moving and the image on screen changing) — creating visually stunning features without the motion sickness sometimes associated with viewing VR content.
• Designed and built the environments for each scenario — a school sports hall, an exam hall, and an office.
• Dropped all the worked up characters into each setting, adding in lighting and shading to ensure each scenario was as realistic as possible.
• Programmed the characters’ actions and movements.
• Used the Oculus Rift SDK2 Software Development Kit and teamed the headsets with surround sound headphones, with all three features shown in succession on each headset.
• Built eight custom PCs to drive the Oculus Rift, using cutting edge gaming technology. The PCs were powerful enough to drive the content at a suitably high frame rate to avoid causing the user nausea, but compact enough for use on the exhibition booth where space was at a premium.
• Mirrored each of the six headsets to an unseen backstage tech area, where our onsite technicians could see exactly what the delegates were viewing and ensure they were on hand to facilitate a constant flow of people passing through the VR experience.