JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY · 2018-2019
A campus tour you can take from anywhere.
JMU's existing VR tour needed a full rethink — new content, a redesigned UI that didn't fight the 360° experience, and a navigation system built for a campus that kept growing.
MY ROLE
UX Designer & Content Curator
STATUS
Delivered
PLATFORM
VR (Oculus Rift S)
THE PROBLEM
A UI that fought the experience.
The existing tour's interface cluttered the 360° view — oversized buttons, confusing navigation, and content that hadn't kept pace with a growing campus. The medium is immersion. The design had to get out of the way.
THE SCOPE
Migrate, enhance, and revamp.
Three parallel tracks: filter and reorganize existing content, film new campus locations with an Insta360 camera, and redesign every UI element to sit in a 360° space without blocking sight lines.
THE CONSTRAINT
No controllers required.
A key goal was integrating a Leap Rig with the Oculus Rift S — making the experience operable through hand gestures alone. Nunchucks and controllers create friction. The design couldn't assume them.
OVERVIEW
For anyone curious about campus — however they experience it.
The JMU VR Tour lives in Madison Hall, JMU's admissions building — available to students, families, and visitors who want to explore campus beyond what a physical walkthrough allows. Whether someone can't navigate the full campus or simply wants to go deeper, the tour meets them where they are. The redesign made it genuinely usable: intuitive enough for a first-time visitor, complete enough to capture what campus actually feels like.
I owned the full scope — UX design, information architecture, content capture with an Insta360 camera, and video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro.
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THE PROCESS
Four tracks, one cohesive experience.
The project started with an audit of the existing tour — cataloging what worked, what didn't, and what was simply missing. Four problem areas surfaced, each becoming its own workstream.
BEFORE
The old UI interrupted the experience.
Large purple pill buttons floated over the 360° environment, blocking content and making the interface feel like an app wrapper rather than an immersive tour.
IDEATION
Logo & button redesign.
We explored a range of button treatments — from minimal underlined text to circular icon-forward designs — to find a style that felt purposeful within a 360° space rather than pasted on top of it.
BETA TESTING
Real headsets. Real feedback.
We ran beta testing sessions with participants wearing the Oculus Rift S — observing where they got lost, what they tried to click, and whether the new button designs felt natural in the VR environment.
"The arrangement of content is seamlessly intuitive, accentuated by sophisticated and futuristic buttons."
JMU VR Tour · Result
THE RESULT
An immersive tour that gets out of the way.
The redesigned tour is live in Madison Hall. New campus locations were added, the information architecture was restructured for intuitive self-navigation, and the UI was rebuilt to enhance rather than interrupt the 360° environment. The Leap Rig integration removed the need for controllers entirely.