A Personalised World

Graham's immersive forest-scape was designed and crafted by Pixel Homes, a digital design studio that specialises in Spacious world-building. Leveraging Spacious' professional suite of design tools they produced a truly breath-taking environment where every polygon is placed to give Graham the perfect experience.

It's a now fairly well observed phenomenon that exposure to natural views can speed the recovery from illness, as well as simply improve peoples' moods and stress levels. Given Graham's condition, it was essential that his working environment was calm and relaxing whilst still allowing him to be connected to the fast-paced activity of his company.

Pixel Homes sought inspiration from the forest, particularly the zen forests of Japan. This intuition was backed up by multiple studies into the effects of virtual nature on VR users. One paper published in the Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking journal found that participants exhibited an "increased positive affect and decreased stress after immersion in VR." A further study saw that "VR stimulation led to a reduction of heart rate and blood pressure" showing a direct solution for Graham's condition. They noted that this study used both visual and audio stimulation to achieve these results.

The final world seamlessly combines calming forest views with Spacious' powerful Environment System.

This system allows for the full customisation of the foliage in the scene using Rhythms. This enabled the company that Graham works at to integrate custom software and data feeds with his Spacious world. Pixel Homes also built a custom audio app that created a procedural soundscape incorporating birdsong, wind and forest ambience that syncs with the rest of the world.

The final cherry on top was adjusting these systems to change depending on the time of day. Now bird song will only play during the day and flickering lanterns will light up at night.

Here Comes the Sun

Graham's world is a great showcase example of Spacious' Environmental System.

Before using Spacious, Graham struggled with having a healthy work-life balance. With more people living in constantly-lit cities than ever before, insomnia and bad working habits only become more common. Screens only worsen the problem, allowing us access to our work apps 24/7.

Graham found that having his Spacious world turn dark in the evenings was a natural trigger to switch off for the day. With the change in light levels apps can become physically harder to use at night - like trying to read a book in the dark - further encouraging our users to stop working.

The reverse is also true, the cinema screen and other entertainment apps can be harder to see in direct sunlight, like using a projector outdoors. This strengthens a strict work-life schedule.

At the same time, we offer full control over the environment so that users can augment their virtual experience.

Examples range from matching time zones to a business contact you're inviting over for a meeting, setting the day/night cycle to 30 minutes to implement a version of the Pomodoro technique, or even set it to stay day-time to allow you to work for longer hours in the winter months.

Apps have the ability to access the time of day and adjust accordingly.

The amount of bird song in Graham's world is driven by his employee's wellbeing data.

But since birds sleep at night he won't hear any bird song then.

As a result he is unable to understand how his employees are doing when it's not the daytime, further reinforcing a healthy work-life balance.