A mixed reality experience for Apple Vision Pro that placed players inside the mechanism of action of a CAR-T cell therapy, visualising the engineering, targeting and destruction of cancer cells at cellular scale, in the room around them.
CAR-T cell engineering, antigen targeting and tumour cell destruction played out at full spatial scale in mixed reality, overlaid on the real world, navigated with eye and hand tracking.
CAR-T therapy is one of the most complex mechanisms of action in modern oncology. The process of extracting T-cells, engineering them to express chimeric antigen receptors and infusing them back to seek and destroy cancer cells is difficult to communicate with slides or even standard 3D animation. Spatial computing changes that. Built natively for Apple Vision Pro using Unity PolySpatial and visionOS, the experience placed the entire CAR-T process in the room around the physician. Oncology experts who had worked with CAR-T therapies for years reported seeing the mechanism in a way they had not visualised before.
"I've explained CAR-T to patients and colleagues for years. Seeing it at this scale, in this way, you understand it differently. It stops being abstract."
The brief was to communicate a CAR-T mechanism of action to oncologists in a format that matched the ambition of the therapy itself. Apple Vision Pro had just launched and we wanted to be among the first in pharma to use spatial computing for HCP education, not as a novelty but as a genuinely better way to explain something that is genuinely complex. The experience needed to run on Vision Pro hardware without a technical operator, with natural interaction and a clear clinical narrative.
I built the experience in Unity using PolySpatial and the visionOS SDK, designing the interaction model around Vision Pro's native eye tracking and hand gesture system, with no controllers and no onboarding friction. The CAR-T process was broken into three spatial scenes: T-cell extraction and engineering, antigen receptor targeting, and tumour cell destruction. Each played out at cellular scale in the mixed reality environment, anchored in the real space around the user rather than on a flat screen.