What SIGGRAPH taught me to look out for as a designer. Part 2: Virtual Reality
If you haven’t read part one which covers Augmented Reality, you can check it out here. If you don’t care about it, then please continue reading!
What SIGGRAPH tought me to look out for as a designer. Part 1: Augmented Reality
I still remember the first time I tried a VR headset. It was the Oculus Rift dev kit 1. It was heavy, with a lot of wires, and with a lot of taking it off, adjusting the settings, then putting it back on again. But it was magical nonetheless. That was 5 years ago and a lot has changed. But is VR ready to go mainstream yet? If you are a designer, how can you prepare for this? Let’s dive in!
When the novelty of VR headsets wore off for me, I started noticing all the things that were missing. The screen door effect, lack of my own body, inability to freely walk around, having a controller as a relay instead of using my hands to directly interact with the environment. And the most frustrating part? The inconsistency of the different implementations between different apps. In one interface you have a floating hand holding the controller that responds to your real fingers pressing the buttons, and in the other, you get a low-poly hand that does nothing and feels like a severed ghost body part floating in the air.
