Customer story
Visiting VR: bringing the world to elderly care homes
JadeVR supports and powers businesses that are transforming elderly care, like Visiting VR in Santa Barbara, run by Dr. Stephen Jones.
With over fifteen years of experience as a community caregiver, Stephen saw a recurring need to meet: a way to bring more meaningful engagement, connection and wonder into the daily lives of older adults. That dream became a reality when he started Visiting VR, powered by JadeVR.
I am not a businessman. I am a community caregiver. I see the need, the isolation, the long days, and the loneliness they bring. I come to this not from the tech side, but from the bedside, where I have wished I could switch the scene – make a ceiling a starscape, make the walls into waterfalls, visit places that actually feel more like pieces of ourselves than the body we are trapped in.
With JadeVR, you helped me answer that dream with a tool that, like the telescope or the radio before it, brings the world within reach in ways once thought impossible. Visiting VR is the bridge.
Dr. Stephen JonesVisiting VR, Santa Barbara
Through Visiting VR, Stephen visits elderly care homes and hosts group sessions of around twenty participants. Each session takes residents on a unique virtual journey, from serene nature escapes to nostalgic destinations like Paris or Venice, followed by an open discussion about what they experienced and the thoughts and memories it sparked.
At JadeVR we are proud to be the content engine for projects like Visiting VR. Watching residents light up, start conversations and connect through shared experiences shows how valuable this technology is, and how important it will become in elderly care. Virtual journeys become shared stories, and those spark conversations that would not have happened otherwise.
This is what JadeVR was built for: to let people like Stephen open up the world for the people who need it most. Thank you, Stephen, for sharing your story.
Read more about Stephen’s work – or book a visit to your care home in the Santa Barbara area – at visitingvr.com.
Customer story
The Turnstyles: travelling together, without leaving the room
The Turnstyles is a small charity that uses virtual reality to tackle social isolation in senior care facilities. Their sessions are built around the group: residents travel somewhere together, and the conversation afterwards is as much the point as the journey itself.
At The Turnstyles, we are tackling social isolation in senior care facilities through the use of virtual reality. Powered by JadeVR, we are opening the door to a world without limits, reconnecting people with their communities and bringing generations together. Our virtual travel experiences provide residents with a valuable social opportunity, whereby they travel to distant lands together and enjoy the conversation that comes from the shared experience. Through our sessions we see confidence grow. This is such a rewarding experience for everyone involved.
Read more about their work – or get in touch with them – at theturnstyles.org.
Customer story
Periscope Pictures: virtual travel for aged care in Western Australia
Periscope Pictures, based in Perth, worked on a VR video project and saw what the medium can do: it puts someone somewhere else entirely. That led them to build a VR service for people living in aged care and people living with disabilities – communities where travel and new experiences are often out of reach. With the JadeVR library they bring the wider world into the living room instead.
It is entirely different to TV, because you are just like being there. The animals close up, just like being beside them. And being able to turn your head, and then you can see another part of the overall scene – I think that makes it a bit more real.
In the sessions residents visit Edinburgh, Venice, Paris and further afield. What they talk about afterwards is rarely the technology – it is the places. One recognised streets from a trip to Italy; another simply said: “I just never dreamed that anything like that existed.” Comfort matters as much as content: “It was quite comfortable, the apparatus. I felt very safe.”
It is a little bit of a false belief that they are too old to try something new, or too old to embrace technology. It is really amazing cognitive stimulation, and sensory as well, and a really good reminiscence tool – and it was lovely then just sparking that conversation between the residents afterwards.
Customer story
Chimera Legacy Foundation: a holiday from hospital
Damien Thompson knows the inside of a hospital better than most. He is a leukaemia and bone marrow transplant patient who later went through a double lung transplant, and he used VR himself during his recoveries. In 2019 he founded the Chimera Legacy Foundation in Brisbane, which runs Holiday from Hospital – a program bringing virtual travel to patients who cannot leave the ward.
As a transplant patient having treatment in hospital, we experience a lot of isolation. One of the first things we want to do, but can’t do, is just escape hospital. When I used their travel experiences for the first time, I felt like I was outside of hospital. It brought me back some normality, and it really helped improve my mood.
One of the trips on his list he had never been able to make was through Europe. He made it with JadeVR.
The foundation now uses the JadeVR library across its Holiday from Hospital sessions. “The tours are very well detailed. You can travel pretty much anywhere in the world,” Damien says. “And not only is it just a fun thing, it’s improving the lives of patients.”