Ave
A Mindful VR Experience Exploring Time and Perspective
Overview
As part of a team of six, I worked on designing a VR experience that encourages users to reflect on their place in the universe. Many VR experiences prioritize interaction and novelty, but we wanted to explore how immersive technology could support introspection and emotional depth.
What did I do?
Our goal was to create a calm, meaningful experience that helps users think about time, existence, and permanence. All of this without overwhelming them with complex interactions or explicit instruction.
We explored multiple concepts before grounding the experience in the idea of time as a flexible, non-linear force, inspired in part by cultural perspectives that view time as cyclical and tied to nature.
We designed a VR experience centered around a mountain as a constant, where users can:
Move around the environment from a detached, “God’s Eye View” perspective
Manipulate time, watching the world evolve and decay
Observe natural and human-made changes, such as waterfalls shifting and cities forming and collapsing
We intentionally kept interactions minimal and relied on environmental storytelling to communicate meaning. Allowing users to interpret the experience in their own way.
I acted as the main researcher and Unity developer for the project: I did extensive research on mountains, societies, and time. In addition, it was my first time using the Unity engine, I worked with Claude Code to help me understand the environment and speed up the learning gap of developing for the Meta Quest 3.
How did it end up?
The final experience created a contrast between permanence and change, encouraging users to reflect on the passage of time and their place within it.
Users engaged with the environment in a contemplative way, shifting from “doing” to “observing,” and the mountain metaphor helped anchor an otherwise abstract concept. The project demonstrated how VR can be used not just for interaction, but for mindfulness, perspective, and emotional reflection.