Building a VR Reminiscence Experience for Care Homes & Hospice
Hello everyone, I am currently working on a project to bring immersive, local outdoor experiences to residents in elderly homes, hospice facilities, and individuals with limited mobility. The goal is to capture high-quality, local hikes and translate them into virtually realistic VR experiences, allowing people who are bedridden or in wheelchairs to "re-visit" familiar spots or explore places they can no longer physically access. The initial vision started as a community initiative, but I am now actively developing the technical roadmap. I am looking to leverage university resources and equipment to get this off the ground, collaborating with departments such as Computer Science and Business to make it a scalable reality. Long-term, the goal is to expand the asset library from local terrain to national and global destinations. Because this group focuses heavily on tech, I wanted to open this up to you all for feedback, advice, and potential collaboration on the technical implementation: 1. Camera & Rig Optimization: I am evaluating 180° and 360° 3D stereoscopic cameras. If anyone has experience with field-testing these on uneven trails, what hardware or external gimbal setups do you recommend to minimize latency and eliminate motion sickness for passive viewers? 2. Media Playback & UX for Care Facilities: The target audience requires completely frictionless UX—ideally a zero-controller, passive "automatic mode" that transitions users through scenes seamlessly. If you’ve built or configured custom video playback environments for the Meta Quest or similar headsets, I’d love to know what frameworks or engines (Unity/Unreal) you found most stable for this use case. I am most familiar with Unity, but I do have experience in Godot, Unreal, and CryEngine. 3. Collaboration: If you are a developer, hardware enthusiast, or videographer interested in building out the pipeline, optimizing the stitching/stabilization workflow, or helping manage project infrastructure, I would love to team up (but this may still be some time from now).