This project was intended to allow us to make a project that could help explore and explain how different mental illnesses affect people on a daily basis. This was done by creating the project in VR and creating some of the possible experiences throughout the project allowing the user to have a more vivid experience. For the project, we were a group of 15 students who wanted to work together to produce this project to help as many people as possible.

The project initially was meant to explore 5 mental health challenges. They were as follows; Panic disorder/attack, Schizophrenia, Derealization, PTSD, and OCD. Each one would contain a corridor that explained how the disorders could appear for people and some possible solutions to help mitigate the problems as much as possible. After this, the user could start the slightly guided tour where they would follow in the footsteps of a person who normally experiences this disorder. At any point or the end of the experience, they would be taken to a calming room which would allow them to take deep breaths and relax/destress from the previous experience. Throughout the project, I was part of the 2 person programming team. This meant that I was able to spend a lot of time learning how to work with VR and solve many of the problems that can occur. At the same time, both I and the other programmers were able to work more cooperatively by setting up a programming standard so that we both could better read through the code in case we needed to search for something.

A highly challenging part of the project was correctly implementing the Quest 2 system into Unity. This came down to the fact that no one had experience working with VR until then, and we had to learn from scratch, mainly using documentation. We decided to spend the first two months of the project setting up a basic Unity scene/level and trying to learn how VR development is meant to work in Unity. This proved more challenging than initially expected as multiple problems seemed to be occurring without standard known solutions. This meant we took more time than desired to properly set up the VR headset in Unity. By the time we understood the VR workflow better, we decided that it would be best to add extra time for all of the future tasks to be better prepared for more unforeseen problems in the workflow. This meant that some of our rooms might need to be removed to have more time to finish certain rooms properly. By the end of the project, we were able to properly implement the Panic disorder and Schizophrenia rooms at a high-quality level, allowing people to gain a deeper understanding of how people might experience them daily.