Virtual reality and design

Long heralded as an early-adopter gimmick with no potential market value, VR is finally set to take the world by storm in 2016. Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR2 have been turning a lot of heads lately, but with the launch of the consumer-grade Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive in just a few months, the path is being paved for full-on immersion.

The biggest catalyst for the success of VR has not been just the technology, but content. No matter how cool the technology is, you’ll need content to actually use it as intended. Just look at the failure of consumer 3DTVs, for example. It’s great in theory, but they launched without any significant anchor content and subsequently failed. VR, on the other hand, has a steady wave of great indie films and incredible immersive experiences already being hyped up and slated for launch.

And with content comes the necessity for design. In an interactive experience, you can’t simply throw your user into a virtual world and expect them to know what to do. We need subtle hints, clues, guideposts, and nudges to get the user to do what we want. This could lead to an abuse of two-dimensional screen metaphors leaking into a 3D world, i.e., flat surfaces representing tactile surfaces that science-fiction movies love so much. We want to avoid this at all costs.

What we should strive for instead is comfort, ease-of-use, and the x-factor. When we’re asking people to don a fifteen pound futuristic helmet with massive headphones around it, the least we could do is mitigate the awkwardness in the virtual world. We can’t expect them to put up with the inconvenience of being turned into a semi-cyborg for the sake of witnessing the amazing world inside. So let’s design for it within these constraints.

As far as comfort goes, let’s minimize the amount of rotational head movement required in our experience. Let’s cut down on motion blur to avoid headaches. Let’s not liberally sprinkle our virtual worlds with fast-moving objects zipping ten feet in front of our user’s faces at hyperspeed. Let our acceleration and velocity of the user’s body in the virtual world match what their brains would expect it to be in the real world.

Navigation should be intuitive and simple. A beacon glowing in the distance is far better than an arrow indicator on the ground. A bell chiming behind the user works well to get them to look behind them, as opposed to some text dropped in screaming “Look Back!” unceremoniously. Intentionally laid-out footpaths and dangerous rocky slopes work better as affordances of where to go and where not to go rather than invisible walls that the user bumps into at the edges of the VR world.

Since VR is relatively new to the non-tech world, there will most definitely be a “whoa!” moment for the every first time a new user experiences VR. We can elevate this further by showing them something that can only happen in a virtual world. Allow a paraplegic to scale the summit of the Matterhorn. Show what it feels like to be the quarterback in a massive football field. Gaze out into space and look at Earth in all its glory from the windows of the International Space Station. These are the sort of x-factors VR needs to really break into the mainstream medium.

People’s expectation of virtual reality will be shaped by the experiences that launch to the world in 2016. It’s up to us whether we want to create gimmicky and nausea-inducing experiences for the sake of quick profit or if we want to make something worthwhile and memorable to give VR the proper treatment it deserves. Designing for VR is not just for the sake of looking good and feeling like a comfortable experience, but also for the user’s physical and psychological safety.

This is an exciting horizon where design can be the difference between a technology being loved for delivering on its promise or hated for failing to seamlessly integrate itself into our lives. With the right mindset, we can achieve the former in a collective effort to create unforgettable immersive experiences for generations to come.