Sea Hero Quest VR


VR game where players help advance dementia research.

New Dimensions

In 2016 we developed Sea Hero Quest for mobile to create the worlds first benchmark for how humans navigate. With over 4.5 million participants on mobile, we had a clear idea how people made navigational decisions, but we wanted to go deeper with virtual reality.

With this virtual reality edition, we were able to isolate head orientation as an additional data point and later, in 2023, we added eye tracking at 200Hz using Pupil Labs devices.

The collection of these additional metrics gives researchers a deeper insight into navigation motivation before a player is aware they’re even making navigational decisions.

virtual reality view of a boat cabin in sea hero quest VR

“…while you're captaining your little boat along snaking channels towards checkpoints, the game is watching you. It's scoring your spatial navigation skill, one of the first innate abilities dementia sufferers experience a deterioration in. ”

– Jamie Rigg for Engadget

pink octopus in front of a boat with father and sun on it, floating through the sea in Sea Hero Quest VR - a virtual reality game that is helping scientist collect data for dementia research

Why VR?

While Sea Hero Quest mobile allowed Scientists to establish the first global benchmark for healthy human spatial navigation, VR technology allows us to generate richer and more precise data through an immersive experience, resulting in deeper scientific insights.

Spatial navigation is a complex task, it relies on the interaction of a wealth of information in our brains including landmarks, memory and proprioception.

Sea Hero Quest VR’s immersive nature helps us to understand this further by offering a higher level of tracking precision, capturing yaw (y axis), pitch (x axis) and roll (z axis) data. This means we can track richer and more complex player behaviours such as the action of turning the head around while exploring an environment. This is a crucial behaviour we exhibit when we naturally navigate the real world.

As with the mobile game, Sea Hero Quest VR was developed in partnership with a number of world-leading dementia scientists, spatial navigation consultants and data security specialists (UCL, Cambridge, UEA, Alzheimer’s Research UK, Deutsche Telekom) and global communications agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

virtual reality view inside of a boat cabin, which is the base starting location for Sea Hero Quest VR, containing the photos taken in game as well as a map of all the locations

How It Works

Sea Hero Quest VR was designed in collaboration with leading neuroscientists. The game is not only an engaging and fun experience but generates scientifically credible data to further our understanding of dementia.

As the player navigates through the different environments, every move they make is recorded. Where the Sea Hero Quest mobile game collects gameplay data every 0.5s, Sea Hero Quest VR collects gameplay data every 0.1s, resulting in more precise data capture which allows scientists to form deeper insights about human spatial navigation abilities.

The anonymous spatial navigation data is stored in a secure T-Systems server in Germany. This anonymous data is then collected and used by scientists at UCL and UEA to study human spatial navigation abilities across all ages, genders and nationalities.

green frog monster in a swamp being fed a hotdog in Se Hero Quest VR
behind the scenes of game development for Sea Hero Quest VR

The Experiments

To make the research even more valuable for scientists, players are encouraged to answer sets of demographic questions, which are all optional. Opting not to answer these questions will not impede the player’s progress in the game.

With Sea Hero Quest VR, human data from players of all ages, genders and geographical demographics will now be collected with a simple wireless VR device.

Sea Hero Quest VR introduced an adapted Morris Water Maze test. The Morris Water Maze is a gold standard in behavioural neuroscience research.

The adaptation of the water maze concludes with a close quarters feeding frenzy as pictured.

Listed are the navigational challenges in Sea Hero Quest VR:

  1. Checkpoint experiment: to assess spatial awareness via wayfinding based on a map

  2. Flare experiment: to assess spatial awareness by challenging the player to determine the direction from which they have come from

  3. Morris Water Maze: to assess spatial memory and learning

behind the sceneces screenshot of Sea Hero quest VR development
woman with a VR headset on her head, playing Sea Hero Quest in virtual reality

The Impact


“Virtual reality game takes on dementia”

BBC News


“Sea Hero Quest hides dementia research inside a VR game”

Engadget

Sea Hero Quest mobile and VR have opened the door to new and innovative ways we can approach solving the world’s biggest health challenges. The advanced technologies used in casual gaming have allowed us to access audiences and data at a mass-scale never before experienced by the scientific community.

Now we are looking to apply the data set for a diagnostic tool.

As with Sea Hero Quest mobile, participation from people around the world with Sea Hero Quest VR has exceeded our expectations. The game has been installed onto over 100,000 devices, accounting for 1% of all Samsung Gear owners at the time.

The incredibly rich data collected from the VR game will be analysed by scientists at UCL and UEA and will then be tested on patients with dementia, which will allow the development of a Sea Hero Quest VR based diagnostic tool in dementia. Preliminary findings from the mobile game were published in 2018, one of the papers for which can be read here.