The holidays are an especially stressful time for kids in the hospital. They dream of being able to take part in regular winter activities like other kids. The Magic Snow Globe used virtual reality in a unique way to transport these kids outside the hospital (without actually leaving the hospital) and into a winter wonderland. Inside the snow globe, the kids could play in the snow, build a snowman, conduct a holiday orchestra, and watch an amazing fireworks display.

The Magic Snow Globe experience was available to children at the CHOC Children’s Hospital for the entire month of December. During this time, all the kids who were at the hospital got a chance to use the experience. On a more technical side, since we knew what room in the hospital the experience would be held, we tailored the VR experience to that. We painstakingly recreated the real room and real shrinking machine in virtual reality so when the kids were inside the VR snow globe and looked up they could see the shrinking machine towers and the hospital room ceiling. This made it feel even more like they were actually shrunk down and inside the real snow globe.

The experience reinforced Honda’s tagline “The Power of Dreams” and brought the kids joy and made them forget that they were in the hospital, so they could get back to just being a kid again.