Overview
A Virtual World for Memory and Reflection
The Team
Contributions
Time Line
1 Nov, 2025
to
12 Dec, 2025
Background
Understanding Implications of VR in Journaling
Journaling is a well-established, evidence-based method for improving self-regulation and self-awareness in daily life. Its primary goals are to encourage constructive reflection, clarify personal priorities, and document experiences over time. While journaling has traditionally relied on written words or drawings, modern practices increasingly integrate emojis, images, and videos to create a richer, more engaging experience.
We asked ourselves, what if, Instead of just writing or adding images, users could teleport to the memories they are reflecting on or to environments where they feel safe sharing their thoughts. The concept draws from sci-fi films where portals lead to new worlds, similar to how VR lets people experience things they cannot in real life.
A Still from Suzume Movie
As VR adds depth and engagement to standard mobile experiences, applying it to journaling can make the practice more immersive and enjoyable. This deeper level of reflection can lead to clearer insights and help users recognize patterns in their lives. By making journaling fun rather than effortful.
A missed opportunity in the VR space
While exploring VR and journaling apps, we found a clear gap; almost none use VR to create personalized worlds for reflection.
We also studied standout experiences across related products. We saw the value of emotional expression from It’sMe, context-rich journaling from Day One, spatial creativity from Gravity Sketch, and story-like organization from Life Story. These qualities helped shape the foundation of Echoes.
Problem
Virtual Reality Still Lives on the Fringe
VR is growing but remains a niche because it is still relatively expensive, uncomfortable or inconvenient for many people, and lacks everyday “must‑have” use cases beyond gaming and a few professional niches. Technical and human‑factor issues like motion sickness, isolation, and bulky headsets also limit how often people want to use it.
Friction
Limited everyday relevance and lack of practical use cases make VR adoption difficult, as it’s still perceived as a niche technology. This creates friction for Echoes, as we must offer a clear and compelling advantage over traditional mobile journaling apps to encourage users to shift to VR.
Discomfort
We can’t ignore that today’s VR devices often cause discomfort. The challenge for Echoes is to avoid falling into the same trap—ensuring the product feels natural in daily life and still delivers real value, even if users engage with it in VR for only short periods each day.
How might we design a comfortable VR journaling experience where users can build personal worlds that make reflection more emotional and meaningful, while fitting naturally into daily routines so VR doesn’t feel like extra effort?
Solution
Emotional Design for VR
Interface Designed to shift emotions
To encourage users to use the VR journaling app, we focused on designing an interface that evokes emotion rather than simply displaying entries in a list. Each journal appears as a portal to another world, similar to teleportation shown in movies, to give users the feeling of stepping back into a memory. The visual direction aims to spark nostalgia, making the experience more immersive and meaningful.
We also create a safe, dedicated space for users to reflect on their emotional patterns. This room evolves as they journal, revealing insights tied to objects, memories, and emotions—almost like a personal world they build over time. By turning reflection into a gamified experience, it motivates them to return, stay engaged, and naturally develop the habit of journaling.
Journal Entries as Portals
Reflecting on Emotional Patterns
We also, leveraged 3D interactions to fully tap into VR’s strengths using spatial animations and playful motion to increase user delight. Inspired by Google’s Gravity Sketch, we prototyped spatial annotation interactions in Unity, making journaling feel more engaging, exploratory, and visually alive.
Delightful 3D Interaction
3D Drawing
Efficiency Through Companionship
We recognized that users won’t always be inside VR, so the journaling experience had to extend beyond the headset. To support continuity, we conceptualized a companion mobile app that allows users to manage data remotely, access journals anytime, and share entries across other applications. The interaction diagram showcases how features are distributed and interconnected across both platforms, ensuring value persists even outside VR.
The mobile app enhances the VR experience by syncing relevant data like recently visited locations or captured media directly from the phone. This eliminates the need for users to manually search or transfer information, making it easier to begin journaling immediately when they enter VR. Users no longer have to stay within VR for everything; journaling happens in-headset, while all other access and management can easily continue through the mobile app throughout the day.
Syncing the user’s recently visited locations from the mobile app.
Syncing the user’s photos directly from the mobile app.
Not Just Usable but Comfortable
In our design, we made certain UX choices to simplify key interactions. Every interface element is intentionally placed and rotated towards the user to make pointing and selecting more intuitive. And, 3D annotations follow a more natural mental model by drawing from the controller rather than raycasting, giving users better precision and control. These refinements ensure the experience is not only usable but also comfortable.
Iterations
Designing Comfort, Layer by Layer
Wireframes
To validate the core interaction flow of our VR journaling experience, we combined our initial sketches with refined wireframes. The sketches helped outline the overall user journey, while the wireframes translated those ideas into clearer layouts and navigational structures. Together, they established the foundation for key moments in the experience—logging in, viewing entries in a spatial home environment, creating a new journal entry, and working on the journal canvas. The wireframes also clarified essential interface elements such as persistent navigation, canvas tools, and the final save confirmation.
User Testing
We tested with seven users in total, running usability sessions after each prototype iteration to assess interaction comfort and validate the core concept.
Protoype V1
Early testing revealed that the interface felt visually overwhelming, especially because of the auto-playing video thumbnails, which we later replaced with static photos. Users also struggled with unclear UI states—particularly in color selection. Drawing was supported with both controllers and hands, while erasing was limited to hand gestures. However, users were more comfortable using controllers, which led to difficulties when erasing.
Home Screen Prototype
Journal Entry Prototype
Protoype V2
In the second round of testing, after improving the home screen with image thumbnails and refining drawing accuracy by integrating both drawing and erasing into the controller.
We gathered additional insights related to UI placement and orientation. Users expressed a need for greater control over where the interface sits, requesting toolkits that could either remain fixed or be repositioned. They also noted that the canvas and image panels occasionally drifted out of view, which led us to implement dynamic positioning to ensure essential UI elements stay consistently aligned with the user.
Home Screen Prototype
Journal Entry Draw & Erase Tool
Protoype V3
In the final prototype, we refined every interaction by introducing clear interaction states and positioning the UI in comfortable, user-friendly orientations. We also expanded functionality, allowing users to add media, music, and text to their journal entries. Testing showed that while users could interact comfortably overall, first-time VR users still struggled with headset steering and needed additional time to understand all available features.
Regarding adoption, we received positive feedback on the concept users genuinely enjoyed creating journals within immersive spaces. This reinforced our belief that VR can meaningfully enhance the journaling experience. All users were able to complete the tasks comfortably, needing only some guidance on operating the VR headset rather than the app itself, which further validates the design decisions made to keep the VR experience intuitive and comfortable.
Retrospective
UX for VR isn’t just about solving user problems. It also means solving the challenges of the VR medium itself.
A key insight for us as designers was recognizing the dual learning curve users faced they were learning our app’s interactions while simultaneously figuring out how to use a VR headset, which often introduced confusion and shaped how they experienced the product. This pushed us to reconsider spatial clarity, onboarding, and interaction affordances, while debugging became essential for observing real-time behavior, identifying breakdowns, and iterating effectively in an immersive environment.
Dual Learning Curve
Users were learning both the VR hardware and our app’s interactions simultaneously, which shaped how they perceived the experience. This made usability testing unique we had to help them feel comfortable with the VR environment without revealing too much about the app itself to ensure unbiased results.
Need for Clearer Guidance
The combination of unfamiliar inputs and spatial interactions underscored the need for intuitive discovery in our design. Users relied on visual cues, consistent feedback, and predictable system responses to navigate confidently. We identified onboarding sequences, tooltips, and contextual guidance as promising strategies to further reduce frustration and hesitation, helping users understand interactions more smoothly.
Debugging as a Design Tool
Real-time debugging became central to our design process. We used Unity not just to build prototypes but as a tool to explore and test interactions in detail, allowing us to play with spatial positioning, tool behaviours, and feedback loops. By iterating directly in the VR environment, we could observe how users engaged with elements and refine interactions. This hands-on approach ensured that design decisions were informed by actual user behavior rather than assumptions, bridging the gap between concept and experience.
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we create.
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