Role
Lead Interaction Designer
Outcome
Designed Lantern Calligraphy, an interactive VR meditation activity that helps users practice mindfulness through deliberate movement, personal meaning, and reflection.
01 / Context
02 / Design Question
03 / Understanding the Space
Rather than starting with VR mechanics, we first looked at how people practice mindfulness outside of VR. The most meaningful experiences were not built around completing a task; they were built around intentional movement, repetition, reflection, and presence.
That became the foundation for evaluating every concept. Instead of asking whether an idea would be engaging in VR, we asked whether the interaction would actually help someone practice mindfulness.
From customer feedback, app teardown, and meditation research, we translated mindfulness qualities into interaction principles: repetition, rhythm, intentional movement, low pressure, and reflection. The strongest opportunity was to connect a physical action with reflective meaning.
Diagram showing competitive anlysis performed of mobile & VR-specific mediation apps
What this showed
The strongest competitors created calming environments, but few made the interaction itself feel meditative or necessary in VR. This pushed us toward a concept where movement, interaction, and reflection were built into the core activity instead of added around it.
04 / Concept Exploration
We explored several meditative activities and tested storyboard directions with meditation experts. Instead of judging concepts only by how calming they sounded, we compared whether each one created a meaningful action, used VR in a necessary way, and fit ZenVR’s lesson-based structure.
Click to see storyboard
Candle Breathing
Rock Stacking
Scenic Haiku
Water Garden Building
Lantern Calligraphy
Diagram showing expert evaluation performed with mediation experts
Expert feedback summary
Meditation experts responded most strongly to Lantern Calligraphy because each step had a meditative purpose: setting an intention, tracing slowly with focus, and ending with a moment of release.
05 / Concept Comparison
Comparing each activity with experts helped separate concepts that were simply calming from concepts that used VR to support mindful practice. The strongest concepts needed to satisfy four criteria at once: intentional movement, meaningful VR interaction, curriculum fit, and reflection.
Lantern Calligraphy stood out because every step served the same reflective goal: choose an intention, trace it slowly, then release it. The concept made the user’s movement part of the meditation, which made it feel more connected to ZenVR than activities that were mostly scenic or procedural.
● Strong fit
◐ Partial fit
This made Lantern Calligraphy feel like a continuation of ZenVR’s teaching model rather than a separate 'mini-game' added onto the product.
06 / Why Lantern Calligraphy
After each core lesson, users choose a short chengyu, or Chinese idiom, connected to that lesson’s theme. They trace it onto a lantern and release it into the virtual environment, turning the lesson into a short reflective practice.
Each step has a specific purpose: choosing a chengyu sets intention, tracing slows the body down, and releasing creates a reflective ending. The activity was designed to enhance ZenVR’s curriculum rather than interrupt it.
That made Lantern Calligraphy useful as a complement to the core lessons, not just a visual moment. The design focused on shaping pace, attention, and emotional tone through interaction.
01
It made mindfulness physical
02
It avoided performance pressure
03
It ended with reflection
07 / Experience Flow
01
Choose an intention
02
Trace with care
03
Release and reflect
08 / Design Decisions
Early feedback showed that lantern calligraphy was successful as a concept, but phrase-selection and instruction panels could create too much cognitive load. Users needed enough context to understand what they were choosing, but long explanations interrupted the meditative pace before the activity even began.
We simplified the flow by reducing instructional copy and audio descriptions, making prompts more direct, and shifting the emphasis from understanding an idiom perfectly to choosing an intention that felt personally meaningful.
We also avoided scoring or correction-heavy feedback. In VR, feedback can quickly feel physical and judgmental because the user’s body is involved. The point of the activity was deliberate attention, not accuracy or speed.
Avoided & Prioritized
Reducing audio cues and focusing the activity around the core tracing interaction made the final experience shorter, calmer, and more meaningful as a complement to ZenVR’s core lessons.
Avoided
Dense explanations, rigid scoring, and correction patterns that made the activity feel like a task instead of a mindful practice.
Prioritized
Short prompts, slow tracing guidance, forgiving feedback, and a reflective release moment that kept attention on intention rather than accuracy.
09 / Polishing the Experience
Taking the activity from beta to polished
After the core concept was working, the biggest shift was visual and experiential polish. The beta version proved the interaction, but the environment still felt rough and the UI competed with the meditative tone.
Use the slider to compare the early prototype with the polished version. The final activity overhauled the environment to feel more immersive, cleaned up the UI, and reduced extra guidance so the interaction felt calmer and more complete.
Impact of polish
Beta feedback helped shift the activity from a functional prototype into a more immersive meditative experience. By overhauling the environment, simplifying the UI, and reducing extra cues, Lantern Calligraphy felt smoother, more focused, and more complementary to the core lesson.
10 / Outcome
The final concept extended ZenVR’s curriculum with an activity users could practice, not just watch or listen to. It gave the product a new interaction pattern while staying grounded in the existing lesson structure.
The project showed that VR UX is less about adding immersion and more about shaping behavior. Pacing, feedback, instruction, and spatial comfort all affect whether an interaction feels mindful, especially when a 2D prototype has to become a 3D embodied experience.
11 / Reflection