The Seattle Public Library (SPL); District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL); and Fayette Public Library, Museum & Archives (FPLMA), La Grange, TX, in partnership with the University of Washington (UW), have launched VRtality.org, a website that provides libraries and other institutions with a roadmap for co-designing virtual reality (VR) apps to support the mental health of teens. The roadmap and website were informed by three separate VR pilot programs developed by the three libraries. Librarians worked directly with teen patrons to create the VR programs, treating them as equal partners in the projects.

During the COVID pandemic, when many schools were temporarily shut down and teens in many parts of the United States were taking classes remotely, “I think isolation was really an issue for them,” said Juan Rubio, program manager at SPL and project lead for VRtality. “There’s a desire to create connections…but they had to be home all the time; they couldn’t go to school.”

Joanna Harris, teen services coordinator at DCPL, agreed, noting that “It definitely varies per individual, but a lot of what I’ve been hearing from the teens that I work with is a feeling…of social isolation. And that’s a big part of healthy teen development—broadening your social circle, hanging out with friends, discovering yourself through those relationships. So, for many of them, having to social distance, all of that time in quarantine, not being able to go to school in person, had a negative impact on their mental health.”

Unfortunately, at SPL and DCPL the pandemic also meant that program participants couldn’t work together in person for much of the project. But last summer, they met for a series of planning sessions using interactive online platforms such as Discord, and used VRChat and Mozilla Hubs to get a feel for what could be done in virtual 3-D spaces. (FPLMA’s location in a rural area with low COVID cases and few state or local restrictions did conduct several in-person meetings for the program.)

At SPL, the group generated ideas by discussing “what mental health meant to them and what kind of environment they would like to create to support their mental health,” explained Jin Ha Lee, associate professor at UW’s Information School and the director of the GAMER (GAME Research) Group, who worked with SPL on the project. Student interns at UW would then take the teens’ ideas and create VR environments with Unity as part of an iterative development process. “There was a lot of back-and-forth,” Lee said. “They’d suggest an idea, [the interns] would go and build it and come back and show it…and then we’d refine it.”

At SPL, the process resulted in “De-Stress Garden,” a VR gardening simulator. DCPL created the “Purrrniverse,” where users explore a “cat café” from the perspective of a cat, and FPLMA’s group developed “Animal Excursion,” where users wander a forest and interact with wildlife. The three environments are now available as Oculus APK files on the vrtality.org site.

“It was really interesting to learn about what people thought would be a good environment to support their mental health,” Lee said. With all three of the projects “there was some commonality” with themes of nature or animals.

FPLMA Director Allison MacKenzie noted that the group in La Grange “wanted something that was adventurous but not too stressful, and they wanted to be able to interact with animals.” The iterative design process proved important, she said, because the earliest version had users interacting with a goat—an animal that is fairly common in the rural community. So, they got back in touch with the interns and clarified that their goal was interacting with wildlife.

“Co-design is such a great tool to use, because it empowers them and validates their opinions and processes,” MacKenzie said. Participants can ask, “‘Why don’t we try to do it this way?’ I don’t think they necessarily get that in school.”

Harris noted that “co-design really allowed them to feel comfortable sharing their ideas with us, as opposed to ‘we’re instructing, and there’s a right answer.’ The fact that we’re all learning together and building this together, I think that A: It helps us establish relationships with them. And B: It allows them…to suggest some crazy stuff and see where it goes.”

Funded by a 2020 CARES Act Grant for Museums and Libraries to SPL with additional funding from the Seattle Public Library Foundation, the two-year program produced a roadmap for other libraries to develop similar projects, in addition to the VR environments created by the pilot groups. VRtality.org includes advice for laying the groundwork for a VR co-design project, building a team and recruiting teen participants, selecting technology for the project, planning and facilitating meeting sessions and design sprints, and links to resources on VR, mental health and VR, and other relevant programs and co-design projects.