Just before Independence Day Weekend, both Veronica and Brandon took part in the 2021 Games for Change XR Brain Jam, an event organized to bring scholars and developers together to exchange ideas and create game prototypes that address current social issues. While Veronica and Brandon have experience designing games for health and behavior change, this was their first time doing so with only 48 hours to go from concept to playable build; an exciting, but considerable challenge.
Veronica’s group, Team 3: Neuromancers, came together to create a VR game to increase positive emotions while reducing negative self-image through a short and intuitive body positivity game for teens. Their creation, PowrPosrVR, instructs players to strike various power poses shown to increase feelings of confidence and capability, and PowrPosrVR rewards players for successfully replicating these poses by having their smiling flower avatar’s body and attached positive sprites move and change colors. After the Brain Jam judges spent some time deliberating on all the projects presented, they awarded Veronica’s team with the award for Best XR Innovation and invited her team to present during the upcoming Games for Change Festival!
Brandon’s group, Team 5: XRStellar, primarily consisted of a group of XR developers, User Experience and Interaction designers, and Environment designers from the University of Miami. They began by speaking about the different social issues that they found particularly difficult to approach, as well as the strengths that a medium like VR technology can provide for empathy and immersion. From this first conversation as a team, Café SereniTea, a VR game to teach self-regulation and peer support skills during panic attack situations, was born. In Café SereniTea, the players take two perspectives: the first from someone experiencing symptoms characteristic to stress-induced panic attacks, and the second from a friend witnessing their friend in distress. The players begin by learning self-regulation strategies through minigames such as regulated breathing and neutral object fixation, and then shift to the bystander friend, who takes steps to remove stressful stimuli from their friend’s immediate environment until they can de-escalate their negative experience.
If you’d like to learn more about (or play) Veronica and Brandon’s 2021 XR Brain Jam projects, follow the links below!