Creating Metaverse Experience for Health & Wellness
"Earlier this summer, we hired interns. Now these creators weren’t brought in to brew coffee, pick up lunch, or stuff envelopes — they were selected from a pool of hundreds to build on platforms where the proverbial paint was still wet. To find our four candidates, we lit up job boards, tapped Discord channels, tipped streamers, and ultimately landed picks from around the nation and across the Atlantic. We were recruiting for jobs that didn’t exist — The Metaverse Intern." —— Posted by Havas Mango
Havas Mango is a creative advertising agency under Havas Health & You network focusing on the metaverse experience. As one the creative interns there, we were given tasks in two aspects:
1. Helping brainstorm ideas and building prototypes for client projects (details will not be mentioned due to the NDA).
2. Pick a metaverse platform, and conduct research about it. And build a metaverse experience within that platform.
I chose Horizon Worlds by Meta, which is a completely VR-based creative platform. Because I'm dedicated to the immersive technology field. Besides, I thought that the feeling of self-existence in the VR world would be efficient for addressing mental health issues.
I created this VR experience with an initial ask: "How can we create a virtual space to ease people's work-life and daily stressors, creating a utopian environment from stress?". And the final outcome was a chill space where players can experience multiple interactions(or, let’s say – little games) that bring out possible emotions of joy, relief, and relaxation.
Anger Therapy
Art Therapy
MBCT
And those games are all built from, and based on proven therapies and techniques - Anger Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and Art Therapy.
What did I learn from this Internship
I got a chance to work with real clients during this internship, which benefitted me a lot. Pitching to the clients could be exciting and thrilling Since you will never know how do they think of your ideas until they begin their comments. I saw the potential of how game development could be integrated into the creative advertising industry. And this insight is so important to me.