Texas Children's Hospital VR Experience

900lbs has helped Texas Children’s Hospital (West Campus) in Houston reimagine the patient experience through the utilization of VR! We are thankful to take sick children in the hospital far out of context and put a smile on their faces with a tool like VR.

The experience transported patients and staff from the hospital play room into a futuristic soccer stadium, where they became the powerhouse goalie and defended shots from a holographic midfielder.

As if that isn’t exciting enough, as we unpack the science of Soccer Blocker we learn that the experience did quite a bit more than just provide a cool experience for participants. Soccer Blocker is designed to serve as a contextual release function in the advancement of patient experience. The system is architected to influence the brain’s contextual ecosystem and engages neural networks that allow the participant to go beyond their physical environment and condition. The opportunity for participants to be immersed in an engaging and exciting virtual reality is a core function of how this experience works to reinforce the out-of-context model of the experience. Equally, the playfulness of Soccer Blocker provides participants the opportunity to engage with high-levels of excitement, sensory engagement, and activity based interactions, that serve as core themes of the experience. Concurrently, the utilization of sport serves the relationship between self and familiarity of the environment, produces a heightened sense of accomplishment and confidence through the patient’s ability to incur saves and defend against the midfielder, and entices the user through the stimulation features of the design; including lighting, animation, hyper modernism, realism, and the intuitive user interface [UI] and user experience [UX] characteristics of the architecture.

One participant’s parent further reinforced this ideal, as they shared their perspective on the value of Virtual Reality and specifically Soccer Blocker from the user experience side of life, “My daughter is 4 years old and we are in and out of the hospital every six weeks. It is really nice to have something different and new for her to try. This is something we will talk about for the next couple weeks. The fact that she is able to stop a soccer ball, which she has never gotten to do in her toddlerhood is really really cool and we are thankful.”

We are truly thankful to partner with Texas Children’s to reimagine how we might advance the patient experience through the utilization of Virtual Reality as a tactical and innovative tool.