Inkspire
A pen, a bakery commission, and a workspace inside a headset.
Inkspire puts you in an illustrator’s studio with three commissions to finish for a bakery that just opened up in town.
There’s a familiar pen in your hand, but the canvas is virtual. It can sit near the desk or stand upright in front of you. That changes more than where you look; it changes how you hold your arm, steady your movements and settle into the task.
For my final-year Psychology & Computing project, our team created this drawing experience to explore working in VR. My individual study compared the two canvas orientations, while the design work considered the experience around them: the room, the interface, the drawings and the steps that helped people get started.
Duration
2025-2026
Role
Solo UI/UX Designer
TOols
Figma, Blender, Qualtrics, SPSS
The tasks needed a reason to exist. We needed a drawing activity that participants could complete consistently. Free drawing would introduce differences in artistic ability, subject matter and difficulty, making the conditions harder to compare.
Tracing gave us that control. The design challenge was making it feel engaging.
Inkspire framed the tasks as commissions for a bakery. The storefront, teacup and cake belonged to the same small world, and the studio gave participants a place within it. Each drawing became something to complete, rather than a collection of abstract shapes.
The narrative stayed light. It gave the activity context without adding much to learn before picking up the pen.
research direction
Participants entered a workspace that needed to fit their seated position, then learned how the stylus behaved against a virtual surface.
The experience began with desk calibration and three practice shapes.
That sequence addressed two different uncertainties: "Is this workspace positioned comfortably?" and "Do I understand how to draw in it?"
The interface also needed to explain each step while leaving enough attention for the drawing itself. Instructions, task assets and feedback were developed in Figma before being brought into the VR application.
task design
Each drawing was split into eight stencil segments. Participants traced the current segment, selected “Next” with the stylus, and continued until the pieces formed the completed image.
This structure gave the interaction a clear goal at each stage. It also kept the task manageable without introducing a countdown.
The three commissions varied the movement involved: the storefront used mainly geometric forms, the teacup emphasised curves, and the cake combined both.
These were interface decisions as much as research decisions. The stencil showed where to act, the button controlled progression, and the completed image gave the sequence a visible ending.
research direction
My study compared a near-horizontal drawing surface with a near-vertical one, using the same stylus, workspace and tracing tasks.
I looked at three aspects of the experience:
Flow
How absorbed and in control participants felt.
Workload
How demanding the task felt.
Affect
Participants’ emotional state during the activity.
Task duration, tracing accuracy and open-ended feedback added context to those measures.
designing the workspace
The environment used warm muted colours, steady lighting and furniture arranged around a clear drawing area. Decorative objects gave the room character, while staying mostly outside the participant’s central view.
Blender let me explore the room’s composition, scale and atmosphere. Figma established the visual direction for the logo, instructions, drawing assets and feedback.
Moving into the final WebXR application introduced compromises. Some of the lighting and finish explored in Blender had to be simplified. The resulting space carried the design direction into a working experience, with a clear distinction between the rendered concept and what participants actually used.
01 / Homepage
Moving the canvas changed how drawing felt.
My study compared a near-horizontal canvas, angled at approximately 5°, with a near-vertical canvas at approximately 85°.
The drawings and stylus stayed the same. The arrangement changed the participant’s posture and the movement required to trace them.
Twenty-six participants completed the study, with 13 in each condition. After each drawing, they answered questions about focus, workload and emotional state. We also recorded task duration and tracing accuracy, then collected open-ended feedback after the session.
The quantitative analysis did not find statistically significant differences between the orientations on those measures.
The comments exposed details that mattered to the design.
Horizontal drawing was more often described as familiar and stable. Vertical drawing prompted more comments about holding the arm up, feeling less steady and wanting physical support. Neither canvas was fully aligned with a real drawing board, which also affected how grounded the interaction felt.
One participant captured the tension clearly:
“I enjoyed the view of vertical but the stability of a table.”
The view and the movement could work differently for the same person.
scroll inside the screen to see more!
02 / get involved
Participants described the calm room and segmented drawings as helpful for engagement. They also identified friction in the surrounding experience.
Some missed instructions positioned above the task. Others noticed a mismatch between the virtual desk and the physical one, or wanted contact with a real surface while drawing.
These observations suggest specific directions for another iteration:
Revisit instruction placement so guidance is easier to notice during the task.
Refine calibration to reduce the mismatch between the visible desk and the seated position.
Test physical support alongside canvas orientation.
Review questionnaire visibility and wording inside the headset.
These are proposed changes, rather than improvements already tested.
We tested Inkspire with two participants before the main study. They needed clearer guidance on positioning the virtual desk and tracing with the stylus.
We added instructional UI prompts for both steps, helping explain the setup before the drawing tasks began.
The experience followed a consistent sequence:
Calibrate the workspace → practise → trace a drawing → view the result → answer a short questionnaire
Participants repeated the drawing and questionnaire sequence across three tasks. Keeping the questionnaires inside VR reduced the need to remove the headset between tasks, although they still interrupted the activity.
Early explorations included a richer narrative and a more developed questionnaire interface. Time and technical constraints led to a simpler final experience.
Inkspire made the relationship between interface and physical interaction much more tangible for me. The position of a canvas affected where someone looked, how they moved and whether they could rest their arm.
It also changed how I read research results. The study did not detect clear differences in the overall scores, but participants still described experiences worth designing around.
I would take the next version into longer sessions and less structured activities, such as sketching or annotation. That would help reveal whether the comfort issues become more significant when someone is using the workspace for their own work.
Reflection
This project brought my psychology and computing background into the same design process: translating theory into a working experience, then examining how people responded to it.
It also showed me why quantitative results and participant feedback need to be read together. Similar scores can sit alongside meaningful differences in how an interaction feels.
The study used a small sample and short tracing tasks, so the findings do not establish how either setup would perform during longer creative work.
If I continued the project, I would test longer sessions, compare tracing with sketching and writing, and examine physical support more directly. I would also revisit calibration, instruction placement and feedback where participants described friction.
Reflection
I looked at participants’ ratings alongside their written feedback to understand how each setup felt to use.
The ratings didn’t show a clear difference between orientations, but the comments revealed where people felt comfortable, struggled with control or missed instructions. These details helped identify what to improve next.
REFLECTION
I went into the project expecting to spend most of my time on how the website looked. Instead, I spent a lot of it moving things around, cutting things back and working out what was important to people wanting to support the animals and our world.
This project reminded me that improving a page does not always mean adding more. Sometimes, simply changing when information appears can make a decision much easier. Not the most glamorous lesson, but probably the most useful one.
As this was a self-led project, the next step would be testing it with people unfamiliar with IWT and seeing where my decisions hold up. I would pay particular attention to hesitation, wrong turns and whether the relationship between the impact and the action feels as clear to visitors.