About
Chronic Pain
While Zone of Hope does not offer medical devices or make any promises about pain reduction, it was seeing how chronic pain affects a family member that spurred our initial interest in using VR to help people. Our art galleries combine concentration, immersion, and emotion to help provide a sense of being and feeling someplace else.
Cancer
The daughter of a high school friend was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Those with children know that they would do almost anything to alleviate pain and suffering from cancer treatments. This event too helped to motivate the creation of something personal to help people, but especially folks who are comfortable with video games.
Gear VR
The first art gallery was built and deployed (side-loaded) on a Samsung S6 phone to be used in a Gear VR headset. While the performance was adequate, it just was not up to expectations for a high quality art gallery. It did, however, provide for an initial prototype and room for improvements. Optimizing for a resource constrained device does force one to squeeze maximum performance out of the hardware. When better devices came out like Oculus Go and Oculus Quest, there was a clear upgrade path using most of the same software.
Founder Institute
Zone of Hope successfully completed the Founder Institute program, using the software developed on the Gear VR as its minimum viable product. Since then we have given many demonstrations and solicited feedback to make it even better.