Scale Worlds
Scale Worlds is a virtual learning environment that enhances students' understanding of size and scale—a critical concept in STEM education. The project was funded through a National Science Foundation award titled Virtual Reality to Improve Students' Understanding of Scale in STEM.
For two years, I worked under the guidance of Dr. Matthew Peterson and collaborated closely with professors and doctoral students from the Human Factors Engineering and STEM Education departments. My responsibilities included drafting design documents, planning user experiences, coding in C#, 3D modeling in Blender, developing in Unity, and managing three design technicians.
Our design decisions were grounded in academic literature on scale cognition, particularly Alejandra Magaña's Framework for Size and Scale Cognition. This framework identifies the core concepts students need to grasp to understand scale effectively—from subatomic particles to cosmic structures.
Results from our first round of usability studies have been published in a Human Factors journal, validating our research-driven approach to educational design.
The project began with extensive prototyping to explore how users might navigate across extreme scales. These early sketches established the visual language and interaction patterns that would carry through to the final implementations.
We developed Scale Worlds for two VR platforms: a room-scale CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) and consumer head-mounted displays. Each platform offered unique affordances for embodied learning about scale.
Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) 
Head Mounted Display (HMD) The environment architecture was organized into three distinct layers, each serving a specific purpose in the learning experience:
User interface: flat interactive elements
Armatures: three-dimensional structural elements
Entities: animals, stars, atoms, and cells as scale landmarks
The scaling interaction was designed to mirror mathematical concepts students encounter in American science and math curricula: changing exponents in scientific notation and moving decimal places in standard notation.
Animation showing decimal place movement
Numeric panel interface for scale navigation
Multiple environment schemes were designed and tested with user interface experts to determine optimal layouts for learning. These studies informed decisions about spatial organization, entity placement, and navigation flow.
Forest environment variant
Path environment variant
I assisted in running two rounds of qualitative usability studies. The research revealed insights about how users conceptualize scale and opened discussions about balancing usability with theoretical grounding.
To make Scale Worlds accessible to students without expensive VR equipment, we developed a web-based version. This required translating the immersive VR experience to a flat-screen interface while preserving the core learning objectives.
To ensure a successful transition from VR to web, our team developed a novel design methodology we call function mapping. We authored a paper about this process, Preserving theoretically-grounded functions across media platforms in interaction design, which I presented at IASDR 2023 in Milan.
Function mapping identified the key concepts learners need to grasp for scale comprehension, drawn from Magaña's Framework for Scale Cognition and other academic literature. We created a chart mapping specific features to each learning concept, ensuring core objectives were preserved across VR and web versions while accounting for the different interface affordances.
We studied existing approaches to visualizing scale, from the classic Eames' Powers of Ten to Nikon's Universcale and traditional textbook diagrams. This informed our understanding of conventions and opportunities for innovation.
Universcale by Nikon
Eames' Powers of Ten (1977)
With the function mapping table as my guide, I sketched interface ideas on paper and in Figma. Since key features were already identified in the mapping process, it was easier to conceptualize and iterate on solutions. The function mapping provided a clear framework for translating the VR experience while preserving essential learning objectives.
I implemented the designs as a working prototype using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Three.js to power the 3D experience in the browser.
