I was the lead designer at Rascali in 2016. Rascali was hired by Boulevard to take over development of Boulevard VR, an arts and educational app that brings collections of art from world renowned museums and institutions to classrooms and homes across the world through the emerging mediums of Virtual and Augmented Reality.

 

My first goal as lead designer was addressing the existing issues with the app concerning the user experience and retention.  I accomplished this by re-designing the Boulevard Lobby, the locus of information and progression, and implementing diegetic U.I., teleportation and intuitive spatial layouts with experience flows founded on game design principals and methodologies. This was shaped by research of current studies concerning human visual perception and neuroscience particularly in the area of the physiological barriers that VR can exceed or interfere with if it's application and impact is not fully understood. 

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The second, and most overarching goal, was to create experiences that captured my personal engagement with fine arts by simulating the presence of physical media while providing the history and context of the work and its era as it relates to ours. VR cannot reproduce the experience of standing in front of a masterpiece, however the power of VR and its inherent "presence" can excite and inspire. It synthesizes the elements of place, time and context into something unique and personal for the student and learning becomes exciting when she is given agency and control of her experience.

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In addition to creating three new Boulevard experiences within the above framework, I designed the American Experience app to include a cooperative game section to be employed in actual classrooms to teach U.S. history using colonial art and literature in partnership with the U.S. Library of Congress.