A mobile AR experience that turns the well-known "gratitude stone" mindfulness practice into a set of virtual stones you always have with you.
Practicing gratitude is well-documented to improve happiness and wellbeing, but the most common technique — a gratitude journal — tends to lose its impact over time as entries repeat themselves. An alternative, physical "gratitude stones," works well but doesn't scale: carrying multiple stones for multiple affirmations gets cumbersome fast.
The AR solution: six virtual gratitude stones — Rose Quartz for love, Aquamarine for hope, Chrysocolla for kindness, Amethyst for positivity, Citrine for happiness, and Larimar for peace — always available on your phone, without the physical clutter.
I grounded the concept in existing positive-psychology research on gratitude practice before designing anything, then sketched the interaction in Microsoft Whiteboard to work out scale, positioning and the core interactions — deciding what needed to be true in the AR space before building any 3D assets.
Each of the six stones was modelled in Adobe Dimension with realistic crystal and pebble textures, paired with matching 3D-text affirmation cards designed in Photoshop. The working prototype, built in Adobe Aero, places the stones on a real tabletop surface via horizontal surface detection, with tap-triggered interactions to reveal each stone's affirmation card — designed against Nielsen's usability heuristics for consistency and standards.
This project is a smaller, faster build than my other AR work — closer to a rapid concept prototype than a full product case study — but it's a clean example of taking an established behaviour-change technique and asking what mobile AR genuinely adds to it, rather than adding AR for its own sake. It also gave me hands-on experience with Adobe Aero, a lighter-weight AR toolchain than Unity, which I now factor in when scoping how much technical overhead an AR concept actually needs.
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