UX Designer & Researcher
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Hi, I'm Anya Osborne
Welcome to my portfolio!
I design and research technology that brings people closer. My mission is to build immersive and intelligent products that empower people to connect, create, and collaborate. I focus on transforming complex systems into product experiences that shift ideas from conceptual vision to everyday use.
With a Ph.D. in Computational Media and a background in game design, psychology, and human-computer interaction, I create research and development programs that link behavioral insight with product strategy in enterprise, entertainment, and training services. Over the past decade, I have led multidisciplinary projects supported by the National Science Foundation and industry partners, delivering tools and prototypes that support social interactions in virtual and mixed reality platforms.
I began my career designing games for creative studios in Europe and North America. Those experiences taught me how storytelling, play, and design systems can influence behavior and build trust. I believe technology’s highest purpose is to enhance physical, social, and emotional experiences. I work with founders, corporations, and investors who share this vision, developing innovations that extend how people work and express themselves in digitally mediated spaces.
Social Emotional Technology Lab, UC Santa Cruz
2022 -- 2025
Lead Design Scientist, XR Collaboration
I led an NSF research program that designed and evaluated five “social superpowers” tools for hybrid and remote teams in Mozilla Hubs. Through workshops, interviews, and surveys with 40+ XR professionals, the project showed how these tools support task talk, emotional tone, time management, shared sense of presence, and creative self-expression in networked meetings. This work produced multiple publications in top tier peer-reviewed international venues in Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design, demonstrating my approach to product design and social features in XR platforms.
Anya Osborne XR Researcher
Social Superpower Tools in VR
VR XR Designer
Social Emotional Technology Lab, UC Santa Cruz
2021 -- 2022
Sr. Researcher, Mixed-methods
Our team created a VR environment that visualizes conversational dynamics for balanced remote communication in the Mozilla Hubs platform. The visualization is represented by elongated cylinders rising above speakers in real time. I adapted the study design, collaborated on the publication, and demonstrated the RtD prototype at CHI’22 Interactivity. The visualization, encouraging participation, was tested using a VR simulated Desert Survival Task. The project resulted in several top-tier conference publications and demonstrations.
Conversation VR Visualization
Social Emotional Technology Lab, UC Santa Cruz
2019 -- 2021
Lead Design Researcher, XR
In the NSF-supported project "Being Social in VR Meetings," we explored seven commercial VR meeting applications to understand their shared social experiences and collaborative abilities. Using an autobiographical landscape research method, we documented our self-usage to gain insights into design choices. These insights are now informing our ongoing Research through Design work in social VR. We're leveraging these findings to create playful and creative augmentations for virtual meeting spaces, aiming to redefine what's possible in VR business meetings.
Anya Osborne VR/XR Designer and Researcher
Being Social in VR Meetings
Game Designer Anya Osborne
Avatar Systems in Social VR
Social Emotional Technology Lab - UCSC, CA
2017 -- 2018
Systems Design Researcher
In this project, I conducted a comprehensive study on the design practices for avatar systems in commercial social VR with creators of VR platforms. The research underscored the importance of avatar systems as the defining framework for user experience in social VR, highlighting the role of embodied locomotion, avatar aesthetics, personal space, social mechanics, and avatar's relation to virtual identity. The findings provide valuable insights into the relationship between design decisions, platform specifics, social contexts, and emerging design practices in shaping the embodied user experience in VR.
Game Designer Anya Osborne
World Of Riders: VR Exergame
Exergame Lab - MSU, East Lansing, MI
2015 -- 2016
Game Designer
World of Riders is my MA thesis project in serious game design,created in a team of two students, where I led the design process. This project was showcased in CHI Play and Meaningful Play conferences in 2016. It is an online multiplayer first-person exergame developed for mobile (iOS, Android) and virtual reality (Gear VR) platforms. Players compete and cooperate with other players to defeat the boss while completing their regular exercise routines on stationary cycle trainers. The gameplay is designed to simulate High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and support people's exercising routines.
Game Designer Anya Osborne
Game Designer Anya Osborne
Dreamy Food
2020
Qualitative Evaluation Engineer, Gen AI
Dreamy Food is a class project developed in a group of three students. The goal was to develop artifacts that appreciate art. Dreamy Food is based on the trained Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) of World of Warcraft (WoW) icons that generates new stylized art using the Google Deep Dream algorithm and Gradient Ascent. We then used a trained food classifier using the Inception V3 model and applied it to classify the resulting Deep Dreamed images of WoW art. The project shows that our algorithm can be employed for creating stylized images that can be viewed by the machine as food.
Game Designer Anya Osborne
Call Of Duty Black Ops IIII
Treyarch Corp. / Activision Blizzard, Santa Monica, CA
2017
Systems Design Intern
Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 is a multiplayer first-person shooter, the first title released without a traditional single-player campaign mode. The multiplayer mode was the first in the series to not feature automatic health regeneration and introduced both predictive recoil and a new ballistics system. I was a System and UX Design Intern on this title. I translated game systems and gameplay user experience goals into intuitive UI to support and enhance the game's multiplayer experience. I designed game systems, conceptual wireframes, user flow diagrams, and low fidelity prototypes to communicate design concepts for further discussions and playtests purposes.
Manu Video Game Maker
MANU, Moscow, Russia
2020 – 2021
UX Researcher and Product Designer
MANU is a game engine software designed for people who want to create games with little coding experience. In MANU, I managed and conducted user research and usability tests, planned and implemented user research strategy and methods, led remote user recruitment activities. I worked closely with marketing and product teams to identify research topics. I performed task analysis, qualitative and quantitative analysis using SPSS. I translated research findings into actionable recommendations and assisted with product design by creating software UX/UI wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes using Figma.
Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab - East Lansing, MI
Saving Draggy
2015 - 2016
Game and UX Designer
Saving Draggy is a mobile third person adventure game for young children with lessons about financial literacy. A player is a wizard apprentice who goes on an adventure to save their missing friend (a baby dragon) by completing mini-games with both educational and entertainment content. My role on this project was to design a single player experience. In applying the research on children's stages for cognitive development, I designed the mini-games system, progression and wireframed the game flow. I also assisted with the design of user interface and narrative.
Game Design Class Project - MSU, East Lansing, MI
2016
Game and UI Designer
DROp. is an Oculus Rift SDK I - powered, first person immersive space walk experience. Player explores asteroid fields and space wreckage in search of salvageable materials. Player’s main objective is to remove the debris by detonating a bomb. DROp was developed in a team of 6 people, where my primary role was designing and employing user interface for VR in Unity, as well as milestone planning, and facilitating the communication among team members.
An
ya Osborne VR Game Designer
Debris Removal Operation in VR
Love Quest: Board Game
Class Project - MSU, East Lansing, MI
2015
Game System Designer
Love quest is a trivia based board game designed for couples. A player and his/her partner answers questions about each other to score points and move through five levels. A palyer and his/her partner needs to work together against the game. The objective is to raise the most points possible by the end of the game. It’s an ideal game for couples trying to go down the memory lane, couples wanting to learn more about each other, or need a good way to break the ice. I prototyped the game using the results of our design research study with people who were in romantic relationships.
Lady Popular Fashion Arena
Playvision, Ltd. - St. Petersburg, Russia
2014 -- 2013
Game Producer
Lady Popular is a browser-based, free-to-play, online multiplayer fashion game developed by the Bulgarian software company XS Software. In August 2012 Lady Popular Fashion Arena was released. Lady Popular is a casual dress-up game that aims primarily at a female audience. Lady Popular has been translated into 21 languages and has over 8 million registered users. At Playvision Ltd. my role was to manage the process of publishing and launching the game for the Russian-speaking consumer market.
Mushroom Wars
Creat Studios, Inc. - St. Petersburg, Russia
2013
Associate Producer
Mushroom Wars is a fast-paced, accessible single and multiplayer RTS game with a quaint visual style that brings skirmish gameplay to the forefront. Battles of opposing tribes of Mushroom armies take place in close-quarters maps using simple, straight-forward controls against AI or friends. It is one of my favorite projects I worked on. My role was an Associate Producer, I prepared localization kits, coordinated work of 8 game language translations, help communications with publishing companies. I also conducted user research studies for further design and development of in-game events.
Nitro Nation: Drag Racing
Creative Mobile, OU - Tallinn, Estonia
2013
UX Researcher and Designer
Drag Racing Nitro Nation 3D is a mobile game with very addictive mechanics. Players can play in the campaign mode or race against each other online in real time. My role on this project was to conduct user research study in order to identify the most attractive profiles of game's character to the game's target audience. Based on the results of the study, I developed psychological portraits for game's characters with reference pictures to be used as guidelines for character artists and designers.
Skills
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Game Platforms: Consoles, Web, Mobile, PC, Oculus Rift, Gear VR, HTC Vive, Microsoft HoloLens.
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Social VR Platfroms: Spatial, Glue, MeetinVR, Mozilla Hubs, VRChat, AltspaceVR, Rec Room, Facebook Horizon, High Fidelity, Anyland.
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Programming (limited): Java, JavaScript, Python, HTML, C#
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Web and Graphic Design: Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign), Figma.
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Game Development: Unity 3D.
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Software: MS Office, Qualtrics.
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Productivity and Communication: Notion, Discord, Slack, Zoom.
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Research Methods: Playtests, Research through Design, Heuristics, Focus Groups, In-depth Interviews, Surveys, Cards Sorting, Task Analysis, Technology Probes.
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Languages: English (fluent), Russian (native).
Awards
CHI PLAY Student Game Design Competition Certificate for (Samsung Gear VR), Austin, TX, USA, 2016
International Game Developers Association (IGDA) scholar at GDC, 2016
Muskie Summer Internship scholar, USA, 2016
Outstanding MA Student Leader Award, 2016
Fulbright student scholar, USA, 2014 – 2016
MI MA Academic Merit Award, Michigan State University, USA, 2015
Young Professionals in Foreign Policy Award, USA, 2012
Centre for German and European Studies Award in St. Petersburg, Russia, 2010
DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship, 2010
Publications
Anya Osborne, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Alexander Leeds, George Butler, Samir Ghosh, and Katherine Isbister. 2025
In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 691–710
Anya Osborne, Sabrina Fielder, Lee Taber, Tara Lamb, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, and Katherine Isbister. 2025
arXiv. Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC), ePrint 2506.21780.
Anya Osborne. 2024
Design of Social Affordances for Meetings in Social Virtual Reality
UC Santa Cruz (2024). ProQuest ID: Osborne_ucsc_0036E_13221.
Diana R. Sanchez, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Katherine Isbister, Monica Tran, Kassidy Martinez, Marjan Dost, Anya Osborne, Daniel Diaz, Philip Farillas, Timothy Lang, Alex Leeds, George Butler, and Monique Ferronatto. 2024
Virtual Worlds, 3, 418-435.
Raquel B Robinson, Anya Osborne, Chen Ji, James Collin Fey, Ella Dagan, and Katherine Isbister. 2024
In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 545, 1–8.
Anya Osborne, Sabrina Fielder, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Timothy Lang, Max Kreminski, George Butler, Jialang Victor Li, Diana R. Sanchez, and Katherine Isbister. 2023
Being Social in VR Meetings: A Landscape Analysis of Current Tools
In Proceedings of the 2023 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '23), Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Jialang Victor Li, Max Kreminski, Sean M Fernandes, Anya Osborne, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, and Katherine Isbister. 2022
Conversation Balance: A Shared VR Visualization to Support Turn-taking in Meetings
In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI EA '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 181, 1–4.
Katherine Isbister, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Osborne, and Jialang Victor Li. 2022
Augmenting Social Presence in VR Meetings
In Social Presence Workshop at the 2022 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22), New Orleans, LA, USA, 1-4
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Osborne, Max Kreminski, Sean Fernandes, Sabrina Fielder, Victor Li, and Katherine Isbister. 2021
Social Superpowers in Social VR
In Social VR: A New Medium for Remote Communication & Collaboration 2021 Workshop in 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 1–5.
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Osborne, and Katherine Isbister. 2019
Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in VR: An Emerging Design Framework
In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 564, 12 pages
Anya Osborne, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, and Katherine Isbister. 2019
Understanding Emerging Design Practices for Avatar Systems in the Commercial Social VR Ecology
In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 241-252
Chandranil Chakraborttii and Anya Osborne. 2023
Characterizing Surprising Reactions of Players in 2D Platform Games
In Entertainment Computing, 2023
Lucas Martins de Souza, Irem Gokce Yildirim, Anya Osborne, and Taiwoo Park. 2016
World Of Riders: Exercising is Fun
In Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (CHI PLAY Companion '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 55-60
My Professional Journey
My journey began with a fascination for how interactive worlds shape human emotion and connection. I started in the international games industry, creating experiences for Mind Candy in London, Creative Mobile in Estonia, and Playvision in St. Petersburg. Those years taught me how design and psychology intersect to influence engagement, collaboration, and joy.
In Los Angeles, I expanded into UX strategy and product innovation, working with entertainment and technology teams to bring ideas from prototype to launch. Collaborating across creative industries helped me develop a systems-level view of how design drives growth, loyalty, and trust.
Today, I partner with companies and research teams to design and evaluate immersive products in virtual and mixed reality. My focus is on transforming emerging technologies into experiences that help people connect, co-create, and imagine new ways of working and playing together.
