This article follows VR for value: how emerging tech can go beyond the hype (part I)
We’re not a virtual reality content agency. As a group of creatively curious technologists, designers and strategists, we are obsessed with applying user-focused design toward solving new challenges. When it comes to considering what skills to add to our toolkit, it’s no wonder that VR is a realm we’re keen to explore.
We started by investing in an HTC VR kit for our London studio to let the team could get familiarized with the hardware. We’ve attended conferences, visited exhibitions and done our research to keep on top of the industry. When the day comes to build our own VR experience, we’ll come prepared.
In the interest of stretching our ideation muscles, let’s try a little thought experiment about how we at Beyond would approach designing and building in VR.
Step 1: Start with a brief
Even though it’s not a particularly new technology, virtual reality still suffers from a strong hype vs. value factor. So while we might be talking about it, we’re not going to build something in VR just for the sake of it. The choice of medium would need to be the result of a user-focused strategy, identifying how a more immersive experience would contribute to creating tangible business and user value– or else we’d risk entering gimmick territory.
We’ll start with a question we’ve been thinking about a lot recently in our London studio: what does the future of urban dwelling look like? More specifically, we’ve been looking into some of the challenges that constantly-evolving urban landscapes face and where innovation could aid different pain points in how we choose to live in cities.
The Brief: How could we redesign the user experience of finding a home in future cities?
At Beyond, we’ve zeroed in on this question before during innovation workshops and conceptualized a data-driven mobile experience that helps us make smarter, better decisions about where and how we choose to look for real estate. The property market is also one that has caught the attention of early adopter virtual reality, so this seems like a great place to start a VR experiment. So now, for the sake of this article, we’ll imagine taking a step further to incorporate virtual reality into the mix...
Step 2: Put yourself in the user’s shoes
The average person views about 9 to 15 properties before purchasing a home. The process, as most of us know, is far from frictionless: receiving calls throughout your work day by agents to set up viewings, running around to see places that don’t look like they did in the photos, contending in poorly organized bidding wars… it’s exhausting. It’s a market still very much dominated by the middleman (estate agencies, landlords, mortgage lenders…) and therefore ripe for change.
So let’s peer into the future… to when you’re deciding to buy your dream home.
You’ve decided to move to venture out of the hustle and bustle of zone 11 and find a more peaceful place for you and your family. Nancy, your virtual assistant, informs you to look in zones 24, 32 and 82: a conclusion based on aggregating your personal data, your financials and a bunch of data about how you move around the city, profiling you based on your family’s hobbies, schools, jobs and commute preferences. One Sunday, you take the sky train out to zone 32 (a neighbourhood you’ve heard is up and coming) to take a stroll and get a feel for it. You’re wearing your latest pair of mixed reality (MR) glasses. One tree-lined street stands out– Nancy introduces you to three properties that have just come on the market in a complex that needs refurbishing, but shows character. You scan through the prices, the spec, the floor plan… that 4-storey unit with the roof terrace and indoor garden, it’s seems perfect!
Would you like to enter VR? Well yes, let’s take a quick look around and get a feel for it. Imagine the kitchen with a marble work top. Would your grandmother’s antique sofa fit in that corner? You can explore more later when you get back to it. Time is of the essence now, it seems you’re not the only one interested to make an offer….
Step 3: getting real (estate) about VR design
Ok, snap back to reality (pun intended). This scenario may sound far-fetched, but in actual fact, we’re not far off from these kinds of immersive experiences hitting the mainstream (not least because Snap’s spectacles are bringing facial wearables out of the hole that Google Glass dug for them). If the intent is there, and the technology too, why aren’t more of us in the agency world jumping on it?
One reason is that, as designers and developers, this sort of brief introduces entirely new ideation challenges. It requires stepping away from the workflows of screen-based apps and websites that have come to feel like second nature. It’s tricky to know what software to use, never mind the processes needed to roll out a new product. So what’s the best approach?
It makes sense to play to your agency’s existing strengths, even when venturing into new territory. Once you’ve done some exploration and ideation, you can start to thinking about the parameters and processes each designer, developer or strategist might need to start creating. Once that creation process starts, it’s time to start testing, iterating and learning.
Step 4: Setting up the design environment
As designers, we can luckily start thinking about how to tackle VR using a design tool that we’re already familiar with: Sketch! First, we’ll need to get our heads around using the software to work with a 3-dimensional space. Second, we’ll need to embrace the importance of testing. Most designers are used to adopting a fair amount of user testing into their workflow. When working with something completely new however, testing how your experience displays becomes even more crucial.
With VR, there are new ethical questions to take into the design process, too. The technology has famously contended with issues such as VR sickness, and has also brought about the question of inducing illusions of embodiment and other physiological consequences. These are entirely new parameters for which a UI designer to get to grips with– but that shouldn’t hold anyone back (read this article from Invision gives a great step-by-step process of how to get started).
Step 5: Setting up the dev environment
For dev teams, WebVR is the next step. It’s a JavaScript API for creating immersive 3D, Virtual Reality experiences in your browser (universally). The current 360 VR images are OK but they’re essentially flat, like being stuck inside a ball with a picture printed on the inside. No depth, no tangible feel, no natural way to change your perspective on an object or space.
With WebVR, we can start immersing a user with actual perceptual 3D depth. This can allow us to use existing UX and design talent to reach wide audiences, from early adopters with expensive headsets down to smartphone users.
Started from the bottom, now we’re (virtually) here
While we’ve seen brands that can foot the bill start to create immersive marketing content for token brand exposure, and VR has become a part of industries such as gaming and real estate, truly meaningful VR applications are still a dime in a dozen. As technology advances rapidly, that’s bound to change sooner than you realize. In the meantime, we’ll continue to stay critical about the hype vs. value factor, and we’ll continue experimenting and learning– so that when that VR brief does come knocking, we’re ready.
And for those still reading, here’s a technical approach for how a developer would get started on this project:
Level 0
Bringing VR to the property market could be as basic as inserting a 360 image of each room of a house and overlaying 2D navigation prompts to each new space to a standard website, like this. Anyone can view this VR experience using a desktop computer or a phone with a gyro (which pretty much all smartphones have). This basic method is already widely used, even without navigation. With this simple idea in mind, the whole team can start to get to grips with basic concepts and principles of VR.
Level 1
At a basic level, we can still take the ‘standard’ 2D 360 images and add 3D menu systems and interactions using WebVR. We could also use Augmented Reality to enable people to trial furniture and wallpaper in a virtual space.
But if we upgrade our thinking here, we should be taking early advantage of rapidly advancing scanning tools as a super efficient supplement to image taking. It takes a similar amount of time to scan a real world room in 3D as it does to take photos.
Level 2
And that’s not all we should be taking advantage of. A step further would be to add static 3D image scans and 3D menu systems, which is exactly what Matterport are doing. The only drawback to what we’d rate as a pretty good system is the ‘static’ part. While it is in 3D, you’re restricted to standing still and looking around. Sound familiar? While similar to the 360 images we mentioned in Level 0, it’s still a good compromise — especially since the illusion of presence improves dramatically when using a well designed system that’s easy to navigate.
This will most likely be the way forward for some time. The creation speed allows for easily adding content to a website — plus there’s integration with VR capable mobile phones that use Samsung VR or Google Daydream.
Level 3
Let’s step it up a notch by thinking about how to add that ‘next level’ natural feel. Converting scans to a professional CAD file and/or 3D space is already possible. So for new builds that are yet to be made, creating the space in 3D from scratch (like a computer game) is already being done. The infrastructure is there but it’s not being used to its full potential.
While consumers aren’t likely to own a headset like the HTC Vive or Oculus for now, their advanced features could add so much value. This is where ‘presence’ is heightened, because it allows the user to shift their body position and perspective, to literally walk around in the house and interact with the space and the objects in it (as this video shows).
You could even go further and make the house viewing multiplayer. Your partner is travelling for work but you’ve seen a house you think you’d both love? No problem. Headsets on, you can tour the house together, alongside your estate agent, all from the comfort of your current location.
When we get our line of thinking straight, we can go crazy with ideas and layers of interaction. It could be practical — looking at ways to suit users with and without controllers, giving informational details and strategic locations. Or it could be used to add flavour, feel, warmth, touches of interactive detail to stimulate a client’s senses to increase emotional engagement and make them feel at home.
This article was co-written by Rhianna Rahim, a UX Designer at Beyond, and David Tyler, a QA Developer at Beyond.
