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 was initially meant to explore five mental health challenges: panic disorder, schizophrenia, derealization, PTSD, and OCD. Each one would have a corridor explaining how the disorder can appear in people's lives, along with some possible strategies to help mitigate its effects. After this, the user could begin a lightly guided tour in which they would follow in the footsteps of someone who regularly experiences that disorder. At any point, or at the end of the experience, they would be taken to a calming room where they could take deep breaths and relax after what they had just been through. As one of two programmers on the project, I was able to spend a lot of time learning how to work with VR and how to solve the many problems that come up when developing for it.

Working as a two-person programming team also meant that the other programmer and I cooperated closely. Usually by setting up a shared programming standard so that both of us could easily read through each other's code for code reviews or debuging. We also made sure to understand our individual strengths and experience levels, which allowed the work based on what we had discussed while still being able to push our boundries. This helped us avoid bottlenecks and keep the project moving at a steady pace.

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.