Remembrance is a virtual reality experience designed to celebrate the joy and companionship shared with passed pets.
By focusing on memory preservation rather than grief, Remembrance creates an uplifting space for users to hold onto the happiness pets bring to their lives.
When a pet passes, owners often struggle to preserve these memories in meaningful and personalized ways. Traditional methods, like photos or keepsakes, fail to capture their pets' dynamic personalities and joyful moments.
This issue is particularly significant in families with children, where pets play an integral role in everyday routines. There is also a growing interest in eco-friendly memory preservation, as traditional memorial practices often involve physical materials that can be unsustainable.
How Might We design a more meaningful, personal, and sustainable way to preserve pet memories?
Key Challenges
How do we create an interactive, meaningful way to preserve cherished pet memories?
How do we provide customization options that reflect each pet’s unique personality?
How do we design a sustainable, accessible alternative to traditional memorials?
Our team began by brainstorming how to combine virtual reality’s immersive capabilities with rituals of memory preservation.
We envisioned a virtual garden, inspired by tranquility and the natural joy of pets, where users could reflect on and celebrate their relationships. We created a VR strategy board to ideate our plans for our rapid prototype.
We created storyboards to map out the user journey and visualize key interactions within the VR experience.
These sketches served as a foundational blueprint, depicting scenarios such as entering the virtual garden, interacting with a pet’s memory node, interacting with the pet, writing a letter, and sending it via a paper plane.
We built a physical prototype to explore tangible interactions, such as writing letters to pets and sending them via paper planes, to test the emotional resonance of rituals.
Usability Test Key Findings and Iterations
Moving to digital prototyping, we focused on creating a forested VR environment with customizations, dynamic navigation options, and interactive memory features.
Key Findings from Usability Tests
Users struggled to understand which controller buttons to use for interactions such as grabbing, selecting objects, or turning the camera.
Users found constantly holding the basket and placing objects inside cumbersome.
Our Iterations
Added a visual onboarding tutorial to demonstrate interactions.
Enhanced grab mechanics to allow easier item placement without aiming for a specific socket.
By blending customization, interactivity, and emotional sensitivity, Remembrance offers users a unique way to keep their pets’ memories alive in a sustainable, meaningful way.
As this was a fast-paced prototyping project, we focused mainly on creating and refining our prototype through usability tests, instead of research. If we were to work on this project within a longer timeframe, we would like to conduct in-depth research into the human-pet bond, grief, and digital memorialization.
Future Research Proposal
User Interviews
Explore user expectations and emotional needs for preserving pet memories.
Contextual Inquiry
Observe rituals surrounding pet memorialization to design culturally relevant features.
Accessibility Testing
Ensure inclusivity for users with disabilities or limited VR experience.
Longitudinal Studies
Examine how users interact with the platform over time to refine its emotional impact.
