InnerVR: creating an Oculus VR meditation game
Learn how Onix-Systems helped to build a VR meditation app
About InnerVR
InnerVR is a meditation and relaxation VR game for Oculus Quest 2 designed to help users live a more mindful life.
Enticing users with diverse content and helping them meditate, calm down, and recharge daily, InnerVR aims to make mindfulness a habit.
The application supports Quest, Quest 2, and Meta Quest Pro.
The problems InnerVR solves
Regular mindfulness practice benefits people both mentally and physically.
Unfortunately, often people who need it most can’t do it due to trouble focusing attention or lack of motivation.
VR technology has the unique capability to create a sense of presence in various 3D computer-generated environments, capturing a person’s attention and blocking distractions from the real world.
This allows addressing
the challenges of practicing
mindfulness by:
offering new places for mindfulness sessions
focusing their attention on the present moment
allowing users to attend to visual and auditory anchors of their choice
reducing the scope of the content in their mind-wandering
There is evidence that appropriately designed VR mindfulness sessions can support mindfulness practice by increasing users’ state of mindfulness, reducing negative emotional states, and inducing positive affect. Some reported effects include decreased levels of sadness, anger, and anxiety, as well as being significantly more relaxed.
This makes VR meditation app development a promising undertaking for game developers, patients, and therapists alike.
How InnerVR works
InnerVR combines guided mindfulness sessions with beautiful virtual worlds to help a person relax, unwind, and connect with one’s inner self day by day.
Users play the game sitting or standing, with the ability to move, using touch controllers.
Once in the virtual environment, they meet Mortimer – a cute alien who will be their guide to the InnerVR world.
Mortimer tells the user how they can travel to different worlds and complete various meditations, encourages to register, and instructs to select a world to travel to.
TYPES OF MEDITATIONS
InnerVR Beta offers several types of meditations, each built around a topic, such as „Body Meditations”, „Loving Kindness”, or „Morning Move“. On each topic, players can choose from at least three individual meditations, e.g., Body 1, Body 2, and Body 3.
INTERACTIVE MEDITATIONS
These experiences redefine the meaning of meditation. Players use their controller and feel haptics when they light lanterns in a peaceful lake village during the Loving Kindness meditation or create their own Sound Bath in a Japanese garden.
AUDIO & VISUAL MEDITATIONS
These meditations in immersive worlds include only audio and visuals without any interactions. For example, guided meditations and soothing music, and visuals of a cozy snow mountain village are designed to help users reflect within and get ready for sleep.
MOVE MEDITATIONS
Players stretch and move their bodies to generate physical Mindful Energy on a peaceful tropical beach and other InnerVR worlds. Move meditations use the Stretch library created by Onix.
When the player starts the world they want to go to, Mortimer will run them through a daily feelings check-in, asking how they’re feeling and why. This information will be recorded and used for future logins for encouragement and support. For example, if the user felt sad yesterday, Mortimer will say: «Hope you’re feeling better today!»
The more Mindful Energy a player generates, the more worlds and activities they unlock, InnerVR thus sustaining their interest and helping build a habitual meditation practice.
Are you interested in custom VR app development? Creative AR/
VR developers are just one click away!
The highlight of InnerVR –
the Worlds
So far, nine virtual worlds have been designed, each with its special features, activities, background music, and ambient noise.
How Onix joined the project
Jimmy Gambier, the founder and CEO of InnerVR, is a product manager at Growth Verticals, Uber, but also tried his hand at virtual reality development.
When he conceived a VR-first relaxation game experience, he began to develop it on his own.
Unfortunately, the project didn’t go well.
The app performed well on Unity but not so well on Oculus VR. When the creators arrived at the mountain forest village scene rendered in the Scriptable Render Pipeline, performance, lighting Issues, and bugs became a serious problem.
Attracted by good reviews on Onyx’s work, Jimmy Gambier contacted us with a request to take a look and optimize the project.
When Onix’s VR developers reviewed it, the problems turned out to be more severe than expected. The non-optimized project was hardly in a working state.
Optimizing what was possible to optimize would be more difficult than building the system anew. The client agreed to the latter plan and gave Onix’s developers relative creative freedom.
The task was two-fold:
01
To build VR games for meditation and relaxation that will be beautiful, interesting, and provide enough content to have users come back at least once a day;
02
To create a product that will sell well on the app store.
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The development team and technology stack
The VR meditation app development team included simultaneously:
2
3D artists
1
developer
1
manager
We like having a project manager who helps manage the project, the development, and art team.
Jimmy Gambier, InnerVR CEO
The tech stack for the VR relaxation app development included:
Amplify, an asset for creating shaders in Unity. We used Amplify to create custom shaders, such as the wind moving the sea, sand, and palm trees. Most of the materials in the project were created using Amplify.
Bakery, an asset for baking lightmaps in Unity. We utilized it to bake lighting throughout the project. And since Bakery offers greater control and quality of work, it helped us better optimize the project.
How InnerVR was built
The development of InnerVR Beta took 6 months.
First steps
The main location was divided into three: starting position in the field, then a lakeshore, and finally a snow-capped mountain. The client was more than satisfied with the new look and optimization.
Virtual guide
The character of Mortimer was introduced to facilitate user onboarding. The friendly alien also adds some cuteness so that users don’t feel like this is a super serious experience.
Challenges
Optimization was the primary challenge. The client wanted some scenes to comprise plenty of objects. However, since InnerVR is essentially a VR application based on mobile hardware, rendering large numbers of objects is problematic.
Solutions
We used a tool that our 3D TechArtist created in his spare time. It lets developers create sprites from models right in the Unity scene, with the scene’s lighting, making it hard to tell if there is an object in front of the viewer or just a sprite with that object’s image. Utilizing it to the fullest for InnerVR, the team was able to save a lot of time, improve the quality of sprites, and dramatically increase productivity with little effort.
The wind effect
One of the most interesting tasks during this Oculus meditation app development was the wind effect for the beach scene. The team created it using an Amplify-generated shader.
Major projects went smoothly, as was Onix-Systems' ability to get a beta approved by the Oculus App Store. Communication was constant and mostly good throughout.
Jimmy Gambier, InnerVR CEO
InnerVR Beta enjoys excellent reviews.
Onix helped the client to prepare InnerVR Beta for release on the Oculus App Lab store. We optimized the beta version to the app store’s standards to facilitate its rapid approval and prepared the textual and visual content for InnerVR’s page.
Excellent. This is such
an amazing app! Very awesome graphics! This app is a powerful meditation tool!
I love it!
BrilliantCrow
01
Collaboration continues
Onix’s collaboration with InnerVR on the Oculus meditation app development continues.
02
Focused on content
The team is now focused on refining the return player experience and adding more content.
03
New interface
The client’s new Creative Director develops a new interface and Onix’s developers are working on new meditations and effects for the existing InnnerVR worlds.
Are you interested in custom VR app development? Creative AR/
VR developers are just one click away!