A new parent app and a redesigned headset for an FDA-authorized lazy eye therapy for children. Design lead, handed off to Luminopia's team.
The short version
The doctor prescribes the minutes. The parent has to make them happen, without seeing inside the headset.
Luminopia treats amblyopia, or lazy eye, with a VR headset instead of an eye patch. The child watches regular TV shows while the software makes the weaker eye do more of the work.
I led the design of both sides: a parent app that didn't exist yet, and a redesign of the experience inside the headset. Research, structure and direction were mine; two designers worked under me on UI.
A doctor prescribes Luminopia for a set time each day. The child wears the headset at home, and the headset tracks every session.
The parent is the one responsible for the minutes, and had no window into any of it. All the content is licensed from studios like Disney, Nickelodeon, Paramount and PBS Kids and curated by Luminopia. Parents still wanted the final say. They kept asking the same three things.
The headset knew. The parent didn't.
The prescription is daily, so the answer had to be daily too.
Curated by Luminopia, approved by the family.
The parent app is only useful if it can talk to the headset, and the headset only shows what the parent allows. So we designed them together, from prescription to the daily session.
The doctor prescribes Luminopia and a daily time.
Luminopia ships the headset to the family.
The parent connects it to the app with one code.
Age setting, studios, and any show to hide.
The child watches. The parent sees minutes, streaks and history.
VR research
Before touching the headset, I studied how good spatial interfaces work, mostly through Apple Vision Pro's guidelines. I presented it to the client as a deck, and what we agreed became the rules for every headset screen.
The child's side, rebuilt on the research: from the first run to the star at the end of a session.
01 / 06
Design decisions
Each one answers a parent's question in one tap, or keeps a child comfortable for a whole session.
Pairing
A headset arrives in the post and has to talk to a phone. That's where most hardware loses people. The headset shows a short code the first time it turns on, the parent types it into the app, and that's it. The app greets them with "Henry's headset has arrived", so the first feeling is that treatment can start.
Dashboard
The home screen opens on today: what the child is watching right now and how much time is left. Then the streak, a daily bar chart against the prescribed time, and a monthly adherence calendar. No clinical charts and no jargon, just whether treatment is happening.
Content
An age rating sets the starting point, and any show can be hidden with one tap. A hidden show disappears from the headset. The child's profile holds the rest: which eye is treated, watch history, the headset and its code. Because the app was new, I worked every flow out in wireframes before the designers took it to UI.
Headset layout
The headset home comes straight from the research: Channels, Shows and Continue Watching side by side, so the child looks across instead of up and down. Navigation sits outside the panels as arrows. New episodes carry a badge, and the day's progress and stars sit in a small bar above.
Luminopia was rebranding while we designed. Their brand designer delivered the guide part-way through, and both apps moved onto it: Poppins throughout, Midnight Blue as the headset's ground, and the Cosmos gradient for progress and active states. The research had already ruled out light weights, so headset text sits at Medium and Bold.
Handed
off
Design discovery, delivered to Luminopia
We delivered the full set, and it's with Luminopia now: their in-house team builds and deploys it on their own roadmap.
What I learned
The VR study only mattered once the client agreed it. After that, every screen and every designer was held to the same six rules, and nobody had to guess why.
Two apps for two users who want different things. Treating them as one journey kept the parent's controls and the child's screens in step.
The rebrand landed mid-project. Because the structure was settled first, moving both apps onto it was translation work.
In healthcare the question changes. It stops being which button is clearer and becomes whether a child finishes today's minutes. That question decided every screen on both sides of the headset.
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