PROJECT: Kusudi VR
ROLE: UI Design, Unity & VR Dev.
DURATION: 1 Month
Challenge Overview
Mental health issues are a significant concern in Africa, with rates of common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety being high in many countries. Factors that contribute to poor mental health in Africa include poverty, conflict, displacement, and lack of access to mental health services. However, there is a significant lack of data on mental health in Africa, making it difficult to fully understand the scope of the problem and to develop effective interventions.
In many African countries, mental health is not a priority and there is a significant stigma attached to mental illness. This can make it difficult for people to seek help and for governments to invest in mental health services. Additionally, there is a shortage of mental health professionals in many African countries, which further exacerbates the problem.
Problem Statements - Secondary Research Based
A
Lack of data on mental health in Africa hinders understanding and addressing of the issue
B
Stigma and lack of priority for mental health in Africa impede seeking help and investment
C
Shortage of mental health professionals in Africa limits access to adequate mental health services.
Based on the challenge overview, I asked ChatGPT to generate 3 problem statements. Here are the revised statements;
How Kusudi aims to solve these issues
Kusudi aims to inhibit the effects of stress and mild symptoms of anxiety and depression with VR. This is done by creating a private virtual world where Africans can experience mindfulness exercises, hence, eliminating the associated stigma that hinders people from seeking help.
Why Mindfulness Exercises
The American Psychological Association (APA): The APA has published several articles and reviews on the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions, including a review that found mindfulness-based interventions to be effective for reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Ideating with a Story Canvas
The digital visualization, experience, and features of Kusudi VR were rapidly ideated & brainstormed using a simple Story Canvas. View Canvas here
Design & Development
Here are a couple of things considered for this experience;
COLOR
It has to be give a natural feel, so a vibrant shade of the hue 'green' was used as the accent color; With a natural mix of white and black.
FONT
In VR, text has to be more legible and its use has to be carefully architecured. Here, I used a san serrif display type called "Pilot";
AUDIO
We incorporated 3 categories of audio; Regular audio feedbacks, ambient meditative soothing music, spatial natural sounds (birds chirping, wind, river splashing, water fall), and an African experience voice guide. Voicemaker was leveraged for this.
UI SCREENS & COMPONENTS
I made a simple UI design of a minimal view of the experience/scene and a few UI Components users can interact with.
BUILDING WITH
UI & SPATIAL DESIGN
I implemented the UI design in Unity with its legacy UI System. I also designed the primary river and water side terrain using Unity's terrain tools and some assets from Sketchfab and the Unity Asset store.
PROTOTYPING
Components Interaction, Scenes Interoperability, teleportation and interactions were incorporated with the XR Interaction toolkit 2.0.
BUILDING & TESTING
The project got built primarily for the Meta Quest 2. We initially tested using the XR Interaction Toolkit's Simulator and then using the actual Quest 2 HMD and controllers.