Secret Garden

AR that let hospitalized children transform their own rooms

Children in extended hospital care have almost no control over their surroundings. Secret Garden gave it back: an AR experience that let pediatric patients fill their rooms with digital plants, animals, and playful objects, gradually turning a clinical space into a jungle, beach, or forest of their own design. A two-level carousel interface made hundreds of assets browsable by a child, and smart session anchoring delivered stable shared AR years before persistent spatial mapping existed. Playtesting showed children eagerly reshaping their spaces, and the team prototyped workflows for scanning a child's favorite toy into the virtual world. The project established a principle that runs through all of Jay's work: AR is most powerful when it transforms the places people already inhabit.