Stairway to Heaven

About

Stairway to Heaven is a virtual reality breathing meditation simulator. Players perform guided breathing exercises that move them along a path through a forest and mountain range. The game utilizes a wearable respiratory sensor to track the player’s breathing.

The research focus of Stairway to Heaven was to examine how training belly breathing in VR can lead to breathing mindfulness and mindfulness.

This game was developed over the course of four months for Massachusetts General Hospital.

Role: Programmer

Time on Project: January 2022 - April 2022

Engine/Language: Unity | C#

Platforms: Oculus, HTC Vive

Contributions

  • Developed breath tracking system utilizing data streaming from a respiratory sensor

  • Implemented calibration system that adjusts gameplay based on how deeply different players can breathe

  • Created progression system that moves players through each guided breathing exercise

Lessons

Stairway to Heaven was the second VR project I’ve worked on and taught me a lot about working with peripheral devices in VR. The game needed to utilize a respiratory sensor, so, in collaboration with another engineer at Massachusetts General Hospital, we had developed a system that uses an external Python script to read the data that was being streamed from the respiratory sensor and ran it through to a C# script in Unity. This also involved adjusting how one normally works with data in Unity, as the rate at which data from the respiratory sensor was being streamed was much slower than Stairway to Heaven’s framerate, which resulted in needing to develop the game’s breathing system around waiting for Unity to read data from the respiratory sensor.