I led the design of Campus Explorer, an Apple Vision Pro application built for MSU Federal Credit Union that introduces newly admitted students to Michigan State University’s campus. A 3D map of campus floats right in front of them in their own space, and every landmark on it opens up into immersive photos, videos, and experiences that make it feel like they’re actually there. Over 500 people have experienced it so far, almost all of them wearing a headset for the very first time.
Client
MSU Federal Credit Union
My role
Product Designer
Timeline
Aug 2024 – Dec 2025
Skills
Product design, Interaction design, Design systems, User research & testing
Team
Sean Hughes, Technical Designer · Rachel Flatley, 3D Artist · Keith Lerner, Technical Designer
Problem: The obvious idea was the wrong one
MSUFCU wanted a way to put itself in front of newly admitted students, and they wanted it to feel like nothing another credit union could show. The team’s first instinct was a literal virtual campus tour, recording a video of one and letting people sit inside of it. I pushed back. A video that plays the same way every time doesn’t need a Vision Pro, and I wanted to build something that could only exist on this headset, something that leveraged everything the platform has to offer.
But, whatever we built also had to survive some hard realities.
Constraints
Every user was a first-timer.
Most people in our demos had never worn any headset before, let alone a Vision Pro, so the first minute had to teach itself.
Fifteen minutes per session.
Every minute spent teaching someone the headset was a minute they didn’t get with the experience.
A platform with no playbook.
visionOS support in Unity was months old, and the official documentation amounted to “read the comments in our code.”
Solution: A campus you can hold
Instead of sitting people inside a video, I proposed a floating 3D map of campus. Students lean in, tap a landmark, and see photos and videos of the place with real depth, read about its history, and even pull out 3D models of campus spots to place in the room around them. Iconic locations launch into full immersive experiences. It grounded the whole product in one navigable hub and gave MSUFCU a natural way to showcase their presence across campus.
Native SwiftUI on every surface
Spatial photos & video shot on campus
3D landmarks you can place in your room
Immersive experiences at iconic spots
How it works
01
A 3D map of campus appears floating right in front of them, in their own space.
02
Tapping a landmark opens a card with photos, videos, history, and 3D models of the spot.
03
Iconic locations launch into full interactive and immersive experiences, such as painting the Rock.
Cards that feel at home on the headset.
I wanted every surface in this app to be beautiful and to feel like it truly belonged on Vision Pro, so I pushed to build them all in native SwiftUI rather than Unity’s UI system. Real visionOS glass, real hover effects, the same materials and components Apple’s own apps are built from.
The campus, captured with real depth.
If the content was going to be flat, this could have been an iPad app. I went around campus with an iPhone shooting spatial photos and video of every location, and stood fieldside at a Spartan football game recording spatial video and audio, so that opening a landmark feels like you’re really there.
Accessibility from the first sketch.
In a public demo you don’t get to choose your users, so accessibility had to be part of the design from the start. Across the map, the UI, and the immersive scenes, I built alternative input paths for users with monocular vision or limited hand dexterity, made everything work from a seated position, and subtitled every piece of audio in the app.
A grab that works like the real thing.
Apple’s gaze and pinch system is great for UI, but drop someone into a scene like painting MSU’s iconic Rock and they’ll reach out to grab the paint can the way they would in real life. So I built a hand tracked grab system from scratch that lets them do exactly that, and in testing, users preferred it to pinch across the board.
Impact: 500+ people and counting
Over 500 people have experienced Campus Explorer to date, through demo sessions MSUFCU hosts in MSU’s historic Union building. Getting first-timers through it took 20 rounds of onboarding testing and three full redesigns, and by the last round nobody needed help getting started. Beyond campus, MSUFCU brings the app to investor meetings and industry conferences as a showcase of how forward looking the organization is.
We also had the chance to demo it for visiting Apple liaisons, who told us this was exactly what they had been pushing universities across the Midwest to build, and that they wished they could show it to the other schools they visit. Campus Explorer has also been accepted to Meaningful Play 2026 at Carnegie Mellon, where I’m listed as a co-author.