Children’s Hospital Los Angeles + Snapchat
Snapchat asked us to develop a prototype which would help children recover from surgery faster by getting them active sooner.
So we transformed a hospital room into an urban jungle.
The Challenge
Children don’t want to “rehab.” They want to have fun.
Repeatedly moving your arm two centimeters back and forth might improve your recovery time, but as any child will tell you: it’s not fun. And that’s a problem, because fun is what children do best. But in a small 3x3 meter hospital room where the most important thing at all times was keeping the kids safe, how were we going to turn rehab into a real adventure for them?
The Project
Creating an Augmented Reality world that helps kids heal
Adventure is all about discovery. And since we couldn’t build a playground in a hospital room physically, we decided to do it digitally. Using the magic of AR, we created a game set in a paper-craft-inspired urban jungle, where every level was designed to activate a different part of a patient’s body: whether walking a few steps to water a flower or raising an arm to welcome the sun. So the more the children played, the better their mobility would become - significantly improving their recovery time.
Making all this work smoothly required some very slick meshing. Mapping was done primarily using LiDAR technology, but since this feature isn’t yet available on all devices we also produced our own algorithm to interpret elements within the room based on surface type. This allowed us to ensure the children were kept away from hazardous zones like windows or wiring, meaning they could enjoy the game in complete safety.