Is virtual reality a medium that can be comfortably enjoyed by everyone?
The VR industry has raced to deliver immersive experiences, often at the expense of comfort and accessibility to people who are not gamers. We tried to make VR, specifically the Immersive Web, a medium of the people, today, starting with the most disenfranchised.
Solving design challenges that make products accessible means ultimately making products better for everyone. We got somewhere. Here is the story.
Calling the problem by its name
AccessibleLocomotionWebXR is a rather long title for a hackathon project submission, right?
I did not choose this title as a tongue twister to trip up the sponsors and organizers when announcing the winners at the MIT hackathon awards ceremony, I wasn’t even expecting to win a single one of the total of three awards my team and I received. The title is not a hat tip to my German heritage either. (We Germans do love compound words.)
I named the project in a way that clearly and unmistakably shows a real-life solvable problem by combining the challenge (Accessible), the goal…
Recently, Vonage Garage, the technology, research, and innovation department of the leading business cloud communications company, approached me to assist them in the design and development of an exciting project. The task was to create an immersive WebVR experience that would highlight their core UCaaS and CPaaS products for enterprise communications at the CPE (Channel Partners Evolution) trade show on September 25–28 in Austin, TX.
In this case study, I describe the process of creating and developing this custom WebVR experience and share what I learned from it.
Briefing with the team and stakeholders
As with any new project, my first step was to learn which…
Like most new technologies, the big debut of VR has been wildly welcomed by early adopters and less so by the average consumer. Even though concepts of virtual reality have been around since the 1950s and have been extensively featured in science fiction books and movies, 2016 is the year where it’s been made available to anyone willing to pay the high price.
Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Playstation VR have built a lot of momentum around attracting gamers and enthusiasts but VR’s penetration into the market, as expected, has been much less rapid among most consumers. The head-mounted displays…
