Dementia
Training
Australia VR

For someone living with dementia, the design of an environment can have a significant impact on how easily it can be understood and navigated.

Lighting, contrast, signage, visual clutter and spatial layout can all influence whether a space feels clear and supportive or confusing and difficult to interpret.

Dementia Training Australia wanted to help professionals understand these principles in a way that went beyond simply explaining them.

The experience places learners inside a series of environments designed to demonstrate both good and poor approaches to dementia-friendly design.

Rather than being shown individual principles in isolation, learners can experience how multiple design decisions work together to shape the way a space feels and functions.

Across three training modules, they explore the environment, identify potential issues and discover how relatively small changes can create spaces that are easier to understand and navigate.

Dementia-friendly design is highly spatial, making it difficult to communicate through diagrams or written guidelines alone.

Virtual reality allows learners to step inside these environments, experience them at full scale and directly compare different design approaches.

By placing the learner within the space, abstract principles such as contrast, visibility, lighting and visual clutter become something they can see and experience for themselves.

Throughout the three modules, learners explore different spaces and examine the decisions that influence how accessible and dementia-friendly they are.

Environmental details including colour contrast, signage, lighting, furniture placement and spatial organisation become part of the learning experience.

The training encourages learners to actively observe and interrogate the environment, connecting design principles with situations they may encounter in real health and aged-care settings.

The original Dementia Training Australia experience was refreshed for standalone Meta Quest headsets, making the training easier to deploy without relying on external computers or complex hardware.

The update also gave us the opportunity to improve environmental realism, simplify interactions and controls, and provide clearer guidance throughout each module.

The result preserves the learning objectives of the original experience while making the training more accessible, intuitive and immersive.

The experience transforms dementia-friendly design from a set of guidelines into something learners can actively explore and understand.

By allowing professionals to experience how different environmental choices can affect the perception and usability of a space, VR creates a stronger connection between design principles and their real-world impact.

It is not simply about showing what makes a space dementia-friendly. It is about helping learners understand why those decisions matter.