Despite indications that recreational virtual reality (VR) experiences could be beneficial for people with dementia, this area remains unexplored in contrast to the body of work on neurological rehabilitation through VR in dementia. With recreational VR applications coming to the market for dementia, we must consider how VR experiences for people with dementia can be sensitively designed to provide comfortable and enriching experiences. Working with seven participants from a local dementia care charity, we outline some of the opportunities and challenges inherent to the design and use of VR experiences with people with dementia and their carers through an inductive thematic analysis. We also provide a series of future directions for work in VR and dementia: 1) careful physical design, 2) making room for sharing, 3) utilizing all senses, 4) personalization, and 5) positioning the person with dementia as an active participant.

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Recent HCI research has addressed emerging approaches for public engagement. One such public-facing method which has gained popularity over the previous decade have been open design events, or hackathons. In this paper we report on DemVR, a hackathon event that invited designers, technologists, and students of these disciplines to design Virtual Reality (VR) environments for people with dementia and their care partners. While our event gained reasonable attraction from designers and developers, this paper unpacks the challenges in representing and involving people with dementia in these events, which had multiple knock-on effects on participant's outputs. Our analysis presents insights into participants’ motivations, challenges participants faced when constructing their ‘absent user’, and the design features teams developed to address the social context of the user. We conclude the paper by proposing a set of commitments for collaborative design events, community building through design, and reification in design.