Emmanuel Corona · UX Researcher, XR

Problem

Kids can't regulate what they can't understand

Mental health pressures on children are rising, yet most mindfulness tools are designed for adults, delivered through flat phone screens, and require a parent to facilitate every session. That monitoring burden falls heaviest on parents who are already overwhelmed.

6primary needfinding interviews with parents and educators

3experience prototypes run to test core behavioral assumptions

2awards: Grand Prize and Most Novel, CS147 Autumn 2023

Our research question: could an immersive, gamified mixed-reality experience teach children to self-regulate, without a parent in the room?

Approach

Gamification meets mixed reality

The insight from needfinding was precise: parents don't want to manage the session, they want to hand off a skill. That reframe shifted the design target from "calming tool" to "independence trainer."

MindCompass uses mixed reality on Meta Quest to place whimsical "Adventure Buddies" in the child's actual physical space, preserving their sense of room and safety while immersing them in guided breathing and narration. Gamified rewards (gems unlocked by completing sessions) borrow from the motivational loops children already trust in games, turning a mindfulness habit into something they return to voluntarily.

The MR choice was deliberate: full VR isolates children from their environment and can heighten anxiety; a phone screen lacks the physiological presence needed to anchor a breathing exercise. Passthrough MR threads the needle.

Process & artifacts

Research-driven from interview to final prototype

Needfinding interviews with six participants (parents and educators, including a 25-year veteran elementary school teacher in Palo Alto) surfaced three consistent themes: parents feel anxious about providing "perfect" care, they strongly want children to develop independence in managing emotions, and gamification is already proven as a motivator for healthy child behavior. Those three findings became non-negotiable design requirements.

Empathy map synthesized from interview with Amanda, 25-year elementary school teacher — Needfinding with educators surfaced the "independence" requirement. Parents and teachers alike want kids to self-regulate, not be managed.

Team conducting needfinding interview with a parent on Stanford campus — Vardhan and Caitlin interviewing a parent in White Plaza, one of six primary research sessions grounding the design.

POV & HMW. Synthesized observations became Point-of-View statements. The team ran an HMW (How Might We) brainstorming and voting session, narrowing 20+ candidate directions to the core problem: how might we help children learn emotional regulation independently?

HMW brainstorming and voting board — Twenty-plus "How Might We" ideas on the board. Dot-voting collapsed them to the emotional-independence thread.

Lo-fi prototyping. Paper prototypes let the team test assumptions cheaply. Caitlin ran lo-fi interview sessions that were critical in narrowing the target age range (landing on 7+) and confirming that meditation, not general mood-tracking, was the right behavioral focus.

Lo-fi prototype interview session run by Caitlin — Lo-fi testing resolved two open questions early: who the user actually is, and what the core interaction should be.

Med-fi → Hi-fi. Figma prototypes iterated the "Captain Compass" onboarding flow, personalization screens, and breathing animation UI before any Unity work began. Interface designs were then integrated directly into Unity.

Captain Compass onboardingA narrated mascot introduces meditation using kid-friendly terminology, explaining the "what, how, and why" before the first session begins.

Personalized configurationChildren choose session duration (5–15 min), audio preferences, an Adventure Buddy character, and a Magical Land environment before each adventure.

Immersive breathing sessionGuided audio narration, synchronized pulsing breathing cues, and immersive 3D environments, delivered in MR so the child's room stays visible.

Gem reward systemCompleting sessions earns gems to unlock new Adventure Buddies and environments, creating a habit loop children return to voluntarily.

Hi-fi Figma screens: Captain Compass onboarding flow — The onboarding flow introduces meditation through story, not instruction. Captain Compass narrates the "why" before children ever attempt a session.

Hi-fi Figma screens: Meditation Adventure breathing pulse UI — The breathing pulse animation anchors the core interaction; playback controls give children agency during the session.

Hi-fi Figma screens: Rewards Store with gems, Adventure Buddies, Magical Lands — The gem economy ties session completion to unlockable content, a gamification loop built from what the research said motivates children.

Heuristic evaluation. A structured heuristic evaluation (CS147 A9) surfaced usability issues before the final prototype was locked, ensuring the hi-fi addressed discoverability and consistency problems identified by external evaluators.

Unity implementation: MR passthrough view of the Whispering Woods environment — MR passthrough keeps the child's room visible while overlaying the 3D environment, the key design decision that separates MindCompass from both VR and phone-screen apps.

Unity implementation: VR Cloud Forest environment — Full-VR mode (Cloud Forest) is available for older children who want deeper immersion; toggling between MR and VR was implemented in Unity with OpenXR.

Impact

Grand Prize, and what the judges saw

Grand PrizeTop project across all CS147 sections, Autumn 2023, one of ~40 teams

Most NovelSecond award recognizing the MR-for-children approach as a genuinely new design space

Research depthSix needfinding interviews + three experience prototypes grounded every feature decision before a line of Unity code was written

Independence testThe core design hypothesis, children can run a session without a parent, was validated through prototype testing before hi-fi development

The project was recognized by Prof. James Landay and the CS147 teaching team as the strongest combination of research rigor and technical execution in the cohort.

My role

I led the Unity implementation: building the 3D MR environment, integrating Figma UI designs into Unity to match the team's interaction flows, and implementing the OpenXR passthrough toggle between MR and VR modes. The technical stack was Unity with OpenXR Plugin and C# (Rider), targeting Meta Quest.

I also participated fully in the design thinking process: needfinding interviews, empathy mapping, and experience prototyping. The research phase was collaborative. Insights were surfaced as a team, not handed off.

Built with Caitlin Kunchur (Project Manager + UI/UX Designer), Vardhan Agrawal (Engineering Manager + Web Dev/Design), and Diya Sabharwal (UX + Game Designer). Advised by Prof. James Landay and TA Amelia.

Reflections & takeaways

The POV/HMW phase felt slow when we were in it. Narrowing 20+ directions to one feels like loss. In retrospect it was the most valuable session of the project. Every subsequent design argument we had traced back to that vote: "does this serve the independence requirement?" Having the research anchor made those arguments short. The other lesson: MR as a design choice only earns its complexity if VR and phone can't do the same job. We had to argue that case from the needfinding data, not from novelty, and the data actually supported it.

MindCompass. Stanford CS147: Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction Design, Autumn 2023. Team: Emmanuel Corona, Caitlin Kunchur, Vardhan Agrawal, Diya Sabharwal. Advisor: Prof. James Landay. Project site: https://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs147/2023/au/projects/AccessingHealthcare/MindCompass/