16 year old Jade Vincent is a rising junior entering her fourth year at NuVu Innovation School in Cambridge, MA. What sets her apart from a typical high school student—outside of her NuVu design studio experience—is a VR headset project that started, not as a school assignment, but rather as a personal project during the summer of 2023.

During that uneventful summer, Jade says the idea of a VR headset simply seemed like a cool thing to do to break up the monotony. “After working on it for a while and talking to members of the community, I started to realize the value in a piece of tech like this being open source. Over time it became a passion project,” she recalls.

Bringing her ideas to NuVu as an Open Innovation project, Jade brought her independent learning into the design studio. Technology Coach Keenan Gray, a WPI graduate with a degree in Computer Science and Interactive Media and Game Development, says he was initially wowed by the ambition and dedication that Jade had already devoted to the project. “I’m a VR enthusiast, so seeing a student tackling this immensely complicated challenge was really cool,” he recalls.

According to Jade, the project has been largely dependent upon the rapid prototyping capabilities of NuVu’s 3D printing capabilities and software like Fusion 360. “When combined with a move fast and break things approach,” she shares, “this let me pump out multiple recognizable iterations a week.”

Keenan says he witnessed the project evolve from a small hobbyist project to one with the potential for a wider audience of virtual reality users. “Jade really started to consider the target user, and who the project was for, and that led to a lot of tough decision making,” Keenan recalls. “One example of this is how the headset was assembled. Originally 3D printed parts were bolted together with finicky hardware, but eventually the 3D printed design was made to snap together, almost like Legos.”

Jade says the largest obstacle in bringing her ideas into the physical space were faced around the design of the human body itself. “I spent many weeks dedicated purely to designing the best adjustment, positioning, and weight distribution I could to achieve ‘good enough’ comfort.”

When asked about lessons learned from her passion project turned school assignment, Jade says the most valuable one has been to not initially overdevelop her concepts. “While having some initial concept development is good as a foundation for your project, this project wouldn’t be where it is today without me going in blind and letting development shape my goals,” she explains.

Keenan points out that this type of project exemplifies what NuVu aspires for its students. “Students identify a passion area (in this case, VR) and find a way to apply the creative process taught at NuVu to this area,” he shares.

As the summer winds down, Jade’s goal for the upcoming year is to go the extra mile to produce more high fidelity projects. “I’ve had a lot of practice in low fidelity prototyping and creating proofs of concept,” she shares, “so I would now like to focus on high fidelity design and fabrication.”

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