Escapade is a Studio Project from Graduate school. The main objective of this project is to create a fun and relaxing virtual environment for children to help mitigate any kind of pain, discomfort, stress or anxiety during, pre or post-operative care.
The project aims to create an immersive experience for pediatric patients through virtual reality using sound and visuals as distraction tools, in the context of medical care, to be useful in painful or difficult procedures.
Distraction-based Therapy is a type of therapy used to help children cope with painful or complicated procedures. Pediatric patients are often subjected to procedures that can cause pain and anxiety. Although pharmacologic interventions can be used, distraction is a simple and effective technique that directs children’s attention away from noxious stimuli.
Virtual Reality (VR) as a distracting intervention to reduce symptomatic stress relate to the idea of distraction therapy through creating experiences for patients. Virtual environments are specifically designed to provide pleasant and engaging experiences, where patients navigate on their own through rich and varied simulated worlds. Studies support that the use of VR has far better outcomes than traditional evidence-based interventions due to the accessibility, control of content, customization options, and cost-effectiveness.
Storytelling helps create a better experience, studies show that digital stories can be effective therapeutic tools to use with children and adolescents/young adults (AYA), thus helping mitigate suffering.
Art has real therapeutic potential to ease the stress and worry of patients in hospitals. Even though the effect may be minimal, there are measurable beneficial physiological consequences of exposure to artwork.
Age Filters: None of the competitive products had age filters to help users navigate the product's content or features. This can be a missed opportunity to offer a more personalised user experience, especially for products that cater to specific age groups.
Progress Bar: The presence of progress bar provides users with a sense of accomplishment and helped them track their progress through the product's content or features. This is an important feature that can enhance user engagement and motivation.
Digital Animations: this provides users with visual feedback, enhancing the overall user experience. It can be a powerful tool to engage users, making them feel immersed and hence distracted from the medical tratements.
I did some research on existing enterprises that pioneer in the market of platforms related to books, as their solutions to similar problems would help me gather insights about their strengths and weaknesses and help me identify different gaps in features that I should address.
User persona helped me represent key motivation, pain points and needs of my targeted audience. Through this I was able to focus on tackling the most important problems and address the major needs of the most important user goals.
Distraction during injections, the user needs distraction or entertainment during medical procedures, specifically while getting injections.
Soothing and calming support, requires support to calm down and soothe any anxiety or fear during medical procedures.
Boredom, children get bored easily, which could lead to anxiety or restlessness, especially during prolonged medical procedures.
Dislike for hospitals, young children do not enjoy the hospital environment, they indicate a need for a more comfortable and reassuring experience.
After all the research I started sketching out ideas quickly, this step always helps me visualize how the screens might look and gives me the opportunity to put my ideas out on a physical platform before digitising everything.
The sketches gave me a good layout to work with, with a basic visual picture in mind I started to digitize my sketches and add details to it. The Mid Fidelity wireframes help me focus on the visual consistency of the screen, here I tried to incorporate common design patterns and elements that directly address users' goals, needs, frustrations, and motivations.
As I am designing an app for iOS system, I referred to the Human Interface Guidelines of Apple in the design process.
To establish the brand identity, I generated the visual style guide to serve as a synthesizing document of the brand ideas and inspirations gathered, incorporating logo design, color palette, typography, and iconography that guides the UI design later.
Escapade, an application that transforms picture books into immersive storytelling experiences that allow children to tag along with their favorite characters and unfold the journey together. Here you get a chance to choose your favorite book from a curated collection of popular picture books and purchase them to unlock New VR Content.
Due to time constraints, only a small section of the story from the book was animated to showcase the concept. I created a sample 360 scene from the book “Maybe” in the form of a VR experience. I kept most of the visuals in the 180-degree position as I was not sure how much the kids would be able to move around while getting different procedures so I wanted to restrict the movement to just the neck while experiencing it.It was important for me to make this cost-effective so the videos can be viewed using both a VR setup and simply a Google Cardboard. I wanted to cater to everyone and make something that could work on a large scale eg: in hospitals but also small scale eg: with diabetics kids getting regular injections at home.
