Scale Worlds
Scale Worlds is a virtual learning environment that helps students understand size and scale, a concept that shows up everywhere 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 Dr. Matthew Peterson, alongside professors and doctoral students from the Human Factors Engineering and STEM Education departments. I drafted design documents, planned user experiences, coded in C#, modeled in Blender, developed in Unity, and managed three design technicians.
We grounded our design decisions in academic literature on scale cognition, particularly Alejandra Magaña's Framework for Size and Scale Cognition, which identifies the core concepts students need in order to grasp scale, from subatomic particles to cosmic structures.
Results from our first round of usability studies were published in a Human Factors journal.
The project began with a lot of prototyping to figure out how users might navigate across extreme scales. These early sketches set the visual language and interaction patterns that carried through to the final implementations.
Most students don't have access to expensive VR equipment, so we built a web version. That meant translating an immersive VR experience to a flat screen without losing the core learning objectives.
To manage the move from VR to web, our team developed a design methodology we call function mapping. We wrote a paper about the process, Preserving theoretically-grounded functions across media platforms in interaction design, which I presented at IASDR 2023 in Milan.
Function mapping starts with the key concepts learners need in order to comprehend scale, drawn from Magaña's framework and other academic literature. We charted specific features against each learning concept, so we could see the core objectives survive the move from VR to web even as the interfaces diverged.
We studied existing approaches to visualizing scale, from the Eames' Powers of Ten to Nikon's Universcale to ordinary textbook diagrams, to understand the conventions and spot where we could do something new.
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. Because the key features were already pinned down, iterating on solutions went quickly.
I built the designs into a working prototype with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Three.js powering the 3D experience in the browser.
We developed Scale Worlds for two VR platforms, a room-scale CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) and consumer head-mounted displays. Each gave students a different way to experience scale with their whole body.
Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) 
Head Mounted Display (HMD) We organized the environment into three layers, each with its own job in the learning experience.
User interface: flat interactive elements
Armatures: three-dimensional structural elements
Entities: animals, stars, atoms, and cells as scale landmarks
We designed the scaling interaction to mirror the math students already see in American classrooms, changing exponents in scientific notation and moving decimal places in standard notation.
Animation showing decimal place movement
Numeric panel interface for scale navigation
We designed multiple environment schemes and tested them with user interface experts to find the layouts that worked best for learning. Those studies shaped our decisions about spatial organization, entity placement, and navigation flow.
Forest environment variant
Path environment variant
I helped run two rounds of qualitative usability studies. The research taught us a lot about how users think about scale, and it opened up honest conversations about how to balance usability against theoretical grounding.
