- Role: producer and designer
- Platform: PC (Oculus vr and web)
- Development tool: Webxl
-Development time: 48 hours
Breath Garden is a game that guides guests through meditative breathing exercises to help manage stress and anxiety. The player literally breathes life into their own virtual garden by breathing into their microphone. The game uses a breath tracking algorithm (https://github.com/moothyknight/BreathCapture.js) to measure the quality of player breaths and modify the game world in real-time. The virtual garden responds to the breath inputs of the guest by growing and flourishing, creating a visual wonder for the guest. We built this experience to help guests manage stress, as stress is a prominent contributor to a variety of mental illnesses and health issues. Our hope is that, by playing this experience, players will have better health outcomes and be able to manage stress more effectively.
The game was created as a part of Games for Change's annual XR Brain Jam, a game jam that challenges participating teams to build games and interactive experiences with transformational goals, whether that be education, social change, or personal well-being. Stress and anxiety are topics that our team members have a passion in addressing, and we wanted to create a simple, easy-to-use experience that people can play daily to help improve their general well-being while also addressing stress.
The judges and jammers were impressed with our work, and we were honored to win the Jammer's Choice award! Because of this, we were fortunate enough to be featured at the Games for Change Festival in July 2021.
Link to project: https://itch.io/jam/xr-brain-jam/rate/1103372