Merlion VR Experience

2025 · Interaction Design · Immersive Experience Design

Merlion VR explores how immersive technology can strengthen emotional connection for international students living away from home. Rather than recreating familiar places, the project investigates how shared experiences can reduce homesickness by helping families and friends spend meaningful time together in virtual space.

Merlion VR app running on Pico

Context

Homesickness isn't just about distance

Every year, thousands of international students leave their families to study overseas. Although messaging apps and video calls make communication easier than ever, many students still experience loneliness, culture shock, and a reduced sense of belonging.

Our early research revealed that the problem wasn't communication—it was the absence of shared everyday moments. Conversations over dinner, cooking together, and simply spending time in the same space were the experiences participants missed most.

This raised an interesting design question:

How might immersive technology help people spend time together, rather than simply talk to one another?

My Role

As the Interaction Designer within a multidisciplinary team, I contributed throughout the entire design process.

My responsibilities included:

  • Planning and conducting user research
  • Synthesising research findings
  • Defining the concept direction
  • Designing user journeys and VR interactions
  • Creating storyboards and prototypes
  • Designing visual assets and presentation materials

Working across both research and design allowed me to continuously translate user insights into interaction decisions throughout the project.

Apps/skills involved in this project: Unity Hub, Pixelmator Pro, Procreate, Pages, Final Cut Pro.
Apps/skills involved in this project: Unity Hub, Pixelmator Pro, Procreate, Pages, Final Cut Pro.

Research Insights

Our early research challenged one of our biggest assumptions.

Initially, we believed recreating familiar environments would help students feel closer to home. However, conversations with participants suggested something different.

Rarely mentioned

Students rarely talked about missing physical places.

  • Bedroom
  • Living room

Often described

Instead, they described missing the simple activities they used to share with family and friends.

  • Cooking dinner together.
  • Preparing meals.
  • Spending time in the same room.

These everyday experiences created emotional connection far more naturally than simply recreating a familiar bedroom or living room.

This insight fundamentally changed the direction of the project.

Design Challenge

Rather than asking

"How can VR recreate home?"

the project evolved into a more meaningful question:

"How might VR recreate the feeling of being together?"

This shift transformed the project from designing virtual environments into designing shared experiences.

Every interaction that followed was evaluated against a single principle:

Does this help people feel connected?

Design Philosophy

Designing for Presence, not Proximity

Traditional communication platforms connect people through messages and video.

Merlion explores a different kind of connection.

Rather than asking users to watch one another through a screen, the experience encourages them to participate in familiar activities together.

Shared cooking became the centre of the experience because it naturally encourages conversation, cooperation, and storytelling without requiring structured interaction.

The goal was never to recreate reality perfectly.

It was to recreate the feeling of spending time together.

When the stove is activated, animated smoke appears above the grill, helping users understand that the appliance is operating and that cooking is in progress.
Users can open the refrigerator door to access ingredients, creating a familiar and intuitive interaction that requires little instruction.
During cooking activities, ingredients respond dynamically to user actions, providing immediate visual feedback. For example, steak changes colour from pink to brown as it cooks, helping users understand cooking progress and creating a more engaging and realistic experience.
The prototype incorporates natural scenery, warm lighting, and ambient sounds to create a calming atmosphere that encourages relaxation and emotional comfort.
When the stove is activated, animated smoke appears above the grill, helping users understand that the appliance is operating and that cooking is in progress. Users can open the refrigerator door to access ingredients, creating a familiar and intuitive interaction that requires little instruction. During cooking activities, ingredients respond dynamically to user actions, providing immediate visual feedback. For example, steak changes colour from pink to brown as it cooks, helping users understand cooking progress and creating a more engaging and realistic experience. The prototype incorporates natural scenery, warm lighting, and ambient sounds to create a calming atmosphere that encourages relaxation and emotional comfort.

Evolving the Concept

The project changed significantly throughout development.

Early concepts focused on creating personalised virtual spaces where students could decorate rooms with photographs, keepsakes, and meaningful objects from home.

Although these environments felt familiar, they quickly became passive experiences. Users could remember home, but they weren't creating new memories.

Through continued concept exploration, storyboarding, and discussion, the project gradually shifted towards collaborative experiences.

Cooking emerged as the strongest direction because it combines culture, routine, conversation, and shared participation within a single activity.

This transition fundamentally changed the experience from recreating places to creating moments.

Creating moments
Recreating places
Early 360° VR storyboard exploring a personalised sanctuary designed to help students stay connected with loved ones.
Shared Community Hub: 360° concept for a communal lobby where users could manage their profile, discover other users, and access shared experiences.
Social Connection Within Personal Spaces: Exploration of virtual visits, allowing friends and family members to enter shared spaces and interact with users remotely.
Personalised Bedroom Space: Early concept exploring a personalised virtual sanctuary where users could customise their space with meaningful objects and memories from home.
Collaborative Kitchen Experience: Early kitchen concept exploring collaborative cooking, shared interactions, and family participation within a culturally familiar environment.
Early 360° VR storyboard exploring a personalised sanctuary designed to help students stay connected with loved ones. Community hub concept exploring social discovery and shared experiences. Early exploration of virtual visits, allowing family members to share personalised spaces remotely. Personalised bedroom concept exploring emotional connection through familiar environments. Early kitchen concept introducing collaborative cooking as a shared cultural experience.

Prototyping & Validation

Rather than investing immediately in visual fidelity, we first built a simplified VR prototype focused entirely on interaction flow.

Objects were intentionally low fidelity.

The environment remained unfinished.

Visual polish was deliberately reduced so testing could focus on how participants navigated, communicated, and interacted with one another.

Greybox prototype

This allowed us to validate ideas quickly before committing to more detailed production.

Early testing reinforced our decision to prioritise collaborative activities over environmental realism.

Invite Family: Early interface concept for inviting family members into the virtual space.
Spatial Layout Exploration: Open environment without a ceiling used to evaluate navigation and object placement.
Low-Fidelity Interaction Testing: Prototype used to validate interaction concepts before implementing functional objects.
Invite Family: Early interface concept for inviting family members into the virtual space. Spatial Layout Exploration: Open environment without a ceiling used to evaluate navigation and object placement. Low-Fidelity Interaction Testing: Prototype used to validate interaction concepts before implementing functional objects.

Designing Natural Interactions

Designing interactions for VR presented a different challenge from designing traditional interfaces.

Instead of relying on buttons and menus, interactions needed to feel immediately understandable through familiar physical behaviours.

Users naturally reached for ingredients, opened cupboards, grabbed cooking tools, and prepared meals using gestures that mirrored real-world expectations.

Visual feedback further reinforced these actions.

Rather than explaining how the environment worked, the experience encouraged users to discover it naturally through exploration.

Merlion VR Experience prototype interaction demo (recorded on Pico).
Object Interaction: Ingredients can be picked up, carried, and positioned throughout the kitchen using controller-based gestures. This hands-on interaction encourages exploration and supports collaborative cooking activities within the virtual environment.
Object Interaction: Users can simulate cutting behaviour with ingredients using natural controller-based gestures.
Object Interaction: Ingredients can be picked up, carried, and positioned throughout the kitchen using controller-based gestures. This hands-on interaction encourages exploration and supports collaborative cooking activities within the virtual environment. Object Interaction: Users can simulate cutting behaviour with ingredients using natural controller-based gestures.

User Testing

We evaluated the prototype through moderated usability sessions with five international students using a think-aloud protocol.

Participants
5
Sessions
Moderated
Protocol
Think-aloud

Rather than measuring task completion alone, we were equally interested in participants' emotional responses throughout the experience.

The sessions revealed that collaborative cooking felt familiar, engaging, and emotionally meaningful. Participants naturally began discussing memories, food, and family while interacting with the environment—exactly the type of spontaneous conversation the project set out to encourage.

Testing also highlighted opportunities to improve environmental feedback, interaction discoverability, and collaborative mechanics for future iterations.

What resonated

Collaborative cooking felt

  • Familiar
  • Engaging
  • Emotionally meaningful

Conversation turned to

  • Memories
  • Food
  • Family

To improve next

  • Environmental feedback
  • Interaction discoverability
  • Collaborative mechanics
Participant testing the Merlion VR prototype using a Pico VR headset during a moderated usability session, completing assigned tasks while providing verbal feedback and sharing their experience through a think-aloud protocol.
Participant testing the Merlion VR prototype using a Pico VR headset during a moderated usability session, completing assigned tasks while providing verbal feedback and sharing their experience through a think-aloud protocol.

Reflection

This project fundamentally changed how I think about immersive experience design.

At the beginning, I believed emotional connection came from recreating familiar places.

Research showed otherwise.

People don't necessarily miss buildings or bedrooms—they miss the experiences shared within them.

That insight shifted my perspective from designing virtual environments to designing meaningful interactions.

It also reinforced an important lesson that continues to influence my work today:

Technology is most powerful when it supports human relationships rather than competing with them.