Monday, 13 April, 2020 UTC
Summary
Think back to October 21, 2015, (the date that Marty McFly visited the future in the hit movie “Back To The Future 2”), when everyone was bummed at the realization that the hoverboard hadn’t been put on the consumer market yet.
But oh, have the tables turned!
Technological advancements have spiraled in a different direction than was commonly portrayed in Hollywood. Instead of futuristic transportation devices, we are presented with futuristic entertainment devices. And the reality of this is unbelievably awesome.
“Designing for VR should not mean transferring 2D practices to 3D, but finding a new paradigm.”
The technology of virtual reality (VR) has been gaining traction, however, there is an absence of methods and best practices when designing for it. In this story, I am focusing on the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) opportunities and problems created by the technology of virtual reality. Designers should expand their expertise to different fields, such as psychology, architecture, sound design, lighting design, and physics, in order to be able to create fully controlled experiences, guiding users in VR by shaping the virtual environment in such a way.
“The future of this medium depends on the content created for it.”
VR is achieved by combining three-dimensional designs with ergonomics. The success of VR is based on the successful application of fundamental user experience techniques to make the user feel as though he or she is immersed in a particular setting. Want to provide a truly unique, first-hand experience to your audience? VR makes it possible to put your audience into a 100 percent designed space with predetermined tasks and goals while giving the user total control of moving, exploring and learning within this space. Let's learn what are some major factors playing a significant role in designing an immersive and UX-positive VR experience.
Trending AR VR Articles:
1. Oculus Go, the Nintendo Switch of VR
2. Expert View: 3 ways VR is transforming Learning & Development
3. Ready Player One : How Close Are We?
4. Augmented Reality — with React-Native
The Four Horsemen of UX Design for VR
Crafting an alternative reality is the ultimate test for designing a flawless user experience that can immerse the senses and trick the mind into embracing the false reality. But creating a VR experience is much more complex than the normal 2D and 3D visual production associated with movies & videogames, which presents designers with a whole new set of challenges.
There are currently four core considerations for the design of virtual reality experiences:
> Interactive and Reactive:
The wide-view, the stereoscopic display creates a three-dimensional image that encourages depth and perspective. VR software should constantly track the user’s head and eye movements, allowing the images to move and change with every new perspective, producing visual feedback and creates an illusion of tactile sensation. The experience is highly interactive and reactive because the design responds to a user’s movements and is therefore always changing. That is why a VR experience has to be designed in a 360-degree view. When you’re designing an experience, you have to anticipate and direct the user’s every movement, being mindful of where to direct the eye using sight, sound — and someday, even touch, taste and smell!
> Comfort and Ease
The most important quality to creating any successful UX design, especially in VR, is ensuring that the user is comfortable throughout the experience. Allowing the user to have complete control of all movements and using other tricks to reduce motion sickness (or “virtual reality sickness”), brightness changes and velocity mismatches are very important. In fact, the chance of simulator sickness was one major hindrance to the technology’s development.
Ability to view and use controls, click on buttons and other design-focused features must be implemented to avoid confusing or frustrating the users. In other words, give the user the ability and ease to completely control their own experience. That is what virtual reality is all about, right? The ability to fully experience a different world and to control your every movement within that world.
> Text and Image Scale
The word of the day in the virtual world is ‘realistic.’ Think about it, you are trying to create an experience that completely envelops the user. Details matter. All visuals should be clear and easily legible, preventing eye strain while also keeping perspective in mind. Adding more and more detail to an object as the user moves closer to it will help establish realistic depth (and vice versa). The large, bold and colorful text will be noticed best by the user.
last but not least…
> Sound
Music and high-quality sound effects are a pivotal feature to encourage experience immersion. By applying positional audio and 3D audio effects to VR, the user will know the direction in which certain sounds originated in relation to where they are, or the audio could be made to sound like it is originating from all sorts of directions, giving the user the illusion of being in the middle of a particular environment. Giving users a volume control may also be a good idea to help the user find a comfortable range.
In general
Generally speaking from a designer’s perspective, VR applications are made up of two types of components: environments and interfaces.
You can think of an environment as the world that you enter when you put on a VR headset — the virtual planet you find yourself on, or the view from the rollercoaster that you’re riding.
An interface is the set of elements that users interact with to navigate an environment and control their experience. All VR apps can be positioned along two axes according to the complexity of these two components.
In the top-left quadrant are things like simulators, such as the rollercoaster experience linked to above. These have a fully formed environment but no interface at all. You’re simply locked in for the ride.
In the opposite quadrant are apps that have a developed interface but little or no environment. Samsung’s Gear VR home screen is a good example.
Designing virtual environments such as places and landscapes requires proficiency with 3D modeling tools, putting these elements out of reach for many designers. However, there’s a huge opportunity for UX and UI designers to apply their skills to designing user interfaces for virtual reality (or VR UIs, for short).
> What does it take to be a good VR UX Designer?
Let me leave you with 3 points...
To design immersive narratives for VR and AR, you must become a strong Storyteller, Improviser and Imagineer.
One of the things I have realized from my VR/ AR design projects over the past few years is that 3D storytelling is central to the Interaction Design technique and to how users experience immersive (virtual, augmented, mixed) realities. As you approach the user experience of Virtual Reality and mixed reality (I’ll refer to that as AR), you need 3 skills under your hat:
- Storytelling
- Improv
- Imagineering
The key is to learn from these traditions in theater, comedy and animation/entertainment and apply them to immersive experiences and VR UX Design.
Let’s look at each of these in more detail and how they are relevant to 3D Interaction Design.
> Storytelling for VR
What? Storytelling follows the structure found in oral tradition, books and movies. This is called a “Story Arc” (with a Beginning, a Middle and an End in it’s the simplest form). Story orders understanding, like a user interface that indicates an action is required. The story is central to how our brains work. And it’s essential to any Holographic or Spatial UI.
Example: Rick and Morty VR- Virtual Rick-Ality. Notice the clever use of onboarding in this piece
https://medium.com/media/f2e912db92a010c5445febef8afde63c/href> Improv for Immersive Experience
What? Improvisation is used in comedy and performance. Its key benefit is generating ideas or thoughts from a non-judgmental state of utilizing what’s in front of you or incorporating it. “Incorporating” means continuing with whatever comes up, and adding to it. “Yes, and..” is the classic catalyst question when prompting an improvisation.
Relevancy to VR/AR: Improv can help you act out a portion of the spatial UI you are prototyping. In fact, ‘walking the space’ as you build the story experience is a common VR UX design tactic.
Example: Wolves in the Walls, a children’s story adaptation. Notice the UX of this piece includes a very “improv” onboarding experience for the user…
https://medium.com/media/93e59fe8b1fe7497636cdf514375ed94/href> Imagineering for VR/AR
What? Imagineering is a Disney World approach to experience design. It is an intentional approach to creating engagement and delight. Imagineering gives you creative license to think “hyper-naturally” for VR/AR.
“Designers should strive to create magical hyper-natural interactions. As a start, consider adding magical powers to ordinary objects to enable users to fulfill their fundamental desires — including teleportation and omniscience” -Hae Jin Lee, Hololens Interaction Designer.
Relevancy to VR/AR: Imagineering can help you think creatively about narrative from a spatial and emotional standpoint. eg Disney’s brainstorming triangle is a valuable way to evaluate your VR/AR piece.
https://medium.com/media/303811297578cb30da0fdb4c8680c86f/hrefExample: Job Simulator “exit burrito” — the way you close the game is by eating a burrito with the words “Exit” on it. Notice this “UI” fits logically and emotionally with the narrative of working in a kitchen or workplace food preparation area. Read how they imagineered the decision here…
Conclusion
The next multi-dimensional plane is ready to be explored, giving birth to an entirely new arena for consumerism, marketing, education, and collaboration. Achieving believable VR necessitates that UX evolves quickly in order to accommodate these new capabilities. The four pillars of VR — interactive & reactive design, comfort and ease, text and image scale, and sound — are just the start as VR is slowly applied to many different mediums and facets of life. As experience designers, we are going to confront whole new challenges to solve in a whole new way.
We may not be quite at Marty McFly’s level just yet, but the future is promising. Besides, who needs an accident-prone hoverboard when you can safely fly through exotic lands in VR?
Like the article, share it with your fellow VR enthusiasts and developers, and reach out to me at https://twitter.com/pandastichuman
Ciao!!
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https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/hrefDesigning for a modern 3D world: A UX design guide for VR was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.