A fully navigable multi-room 3D environment placing healthcare professionals inside the home of a CKD patient, revealing through environmental storytelling and interactive discovery the invisible daily burden chronic kidney disease places on every aspect of ordinary life.
Delegates at a major nephrology congress queued to step inside the experience, and the client commissioned a VR version within six months of the first delivery.
The brief was to increase the awareness of CKD symptoms and how they fit within a patient environment. By using a series of key indicators in each room, such as a hardly used exercise bike, or missed calls from family, it drove home the impact of someone living with this condition. On the congress floor it drew a consistent crowd and generated some very detailed conversations. The positive feedback led to a virtual reality version of the touchscreen app being used for future congresses.
"We were impressed by the level of detail and the way it brought the patient's experience to life. It was a powerful tool for building empathy among healthcare professionals."
The client needed a congress activation that could communicate the lived reality of CKD to nephrologists, renal nurses and primary care physicians in a way that clinical messaging alone could not. The disease is largely invisible to the outside world and frequently underestimated even by the HCPs managing it. What does persistent fatigue actually do to a person's ability to stay connected to their family, maintain their home, or keep up with the physical activity they were told would help? The brief was to build empathy at scale, to make HCPs feel the weight of that gap rather than simply receive data about it. A touchscreen version was developed initially almost as a proof of concept, with the promise of a more immersive experience for future events.
I developed a fully navigable multi-room 3D environment in Unity. The environment was the home of a fictional CKD patient, with a bespoke room-to-room navigation system and a click-to-discover interaction layer. Players moved through five rooms at their own pace, finding twelve interactive hotspots embedded in the environment. Each discovery was scored and tracked, giving delegates a sense of the cumulative weight of the condition across a single day.