VR Product Design 101 — How to Construct a Solid Framework for a Livable Virtual World?
It is easier to screw up a virtual space than building a good one. Can we really make the world a better place? Or it is just self-deception. For the physical world, we might not have many impacts, but for the virtual one, opportunities and responsibilities are both in our hands as designers.
Imaging myself as a professor from Hogwarts and a philosopher pursuing the world's truth is my trick for creating a good world framework for VR products. As a VR content creator, my job is to put the necessary flesh on the whole concept of the “magic” of this virtual world and let users gradually believe it really exists and then enjoy their stay.
Constructing a reasonable virtual world is quite challenging 🤯 but necessary.
VR Product users, likewise new wizards, need to be trained in order to do magic. But not like the students of Hogwarts who study for high scores, our consumers play for fun and thus want to learn effortlessly, smoothly, and even subconsciously.
Here is the contradiction: on the one hand, consumers with limited attention want to enjoy a bite of their virtual life right away. On the other hand, the complex nature of a 3D multi-channeled virtual world raises a high bar for newcomers. VR newbies learning how to behave in VR can have similar struggles with new magicians practicing new spells. The controllers of the VR headset are just like wizards’ wands. Without a specific way of wand-waving, no magician can do spellwork. Likewise, every effective command emitted from VR users requires a clearly defined body motion and corresponding device operation. It could be thousands of ways of using that controller. A button can be half-pressed or fully pressed. A rotation can be done by twisting your wrist or drawing the circle in the air. The possibilities of input and output mechanisms just add to the difficulty of the design.
A virtual world with a well-defined framework design is the only resort to this paradox. VR product with a bad virtual world design is like a dangerous building that can fall at any time. When users feel confused and insecure within it, they will leave, not only physically but also leave horrible reviews under your product page. Instead, a good virtual world design can invite users' generosity; they will genuinely want to stay and come back with friends even at the cost of additional learning efforts.
A good example is The Under Presents, a VR immersive theatre app. I have participated in one of the multiplayer shows before. It took time to learn the virtual avatar, the concept of the play, and the world. And it is the weirdest social experience I have ever had. No voice conversation, no facial expression, only simplified body motions via hands, arms, and torso. But I can feel a special connection with other players and also feel safe even with a group of random strangers. The experience was so good that I can’t stop recommending it to my friends and come back to explore more.
So what is the secret formula for those VR apps?
How can shape a good virtual world invites people to visit and stay and allow rich experiences to flourish?
In this article, I would like to give my equation of a good virtual world design, which I synthesized from the past 5 years of immersive experience. But before talking about what to do, I want first to discuss what not to.
🙅Don’t copy the reality. Create a virtual one.
It isn’t worth our efforts to copy every detail of the physical and psychological reality of the actual world. First of all, technically, reproducing the real world is just a fantasy. How can I prove what I see is the reality? — such Reality question keeps generations of philosophers, psychologists, physicists, and brain scientists up at night. No one has the answer yet. And without the knowledge of how reality gets generated, computers have no way to simulate it. Computers can’t trick the human brain when we, as creators, still don’t understand how the brain drives us.
Current computer vision technology can’t even figure out our finger activities. Think about the nuances of motions our finger can do to assist daily eating, writing, drawing, typing, and only a few of them are supported by current consumer-level devices. Not to mention the mysterious eye motion, countless body motions, and unknown brain activities.
The good news is that with all those hardware and software limitations, we can still achieve tons of things in VR. More realities don’t ensure high quality. Our users don’t need another “real” world. And if the real world is that good, it won’t be that many fictional stories. We are not satisfied with reality; In the real world, human beings are just so powerless with the constraints of physicality. Height can kill us. Fire can burn us, the water may drown us. This is the chance for virtual reality.
I find that the secret of good VR products is to give our users the right amount of fidelity; learn from the actual world but always keep the flavor of virtuality at its core. So when I construct a virtual world, I like asking myself the following questions:
- What rules of the real world should include?
- Wha rules of the real world can be removed?
- What can new rules of the virtual world be created?
And I tend to scrutinize every design decision that removes some realities or add something new to the virtual world. In VR, designers get the chance to play God’s role. Designers can release the constraints of distance and size of the body. Like in Google Earth, users become the giant and teleport to any place on earth. Designers can also get rid of the tangible danger of misoperation in a VR training app. This power of freeing our users from this physical world and their physical bodies may, in turn, allure us to corrupt the comfortability of the virtual world and thus hamper users.
I always remind myself: even though the world is virtual, the residences are still humans. Our body and mind have their own limits. Not like writing a fictional novel, we, as VR designers, have less freedom.
👩🎨 The Formula of Shaping a Virtual World
I will wear a philosopher hat during the process of shaping the virtual world. Like a philosopher seeking the truth of the world, I like asking three essential questions from a user’s perspective:
- Who am I? What is identity?
- What can I do here? What is the truth of the world?
- Why am I here? What is the value or the meaning of life?
And I start shipping the virtual world by thinking about what design I should provide to answer those questions so that our users can
=>mentally live in this world
=>want to stay here or come back
=>want to bring their friends to this product.
Q1: Who am I?
🦖Virtual Body
The virtual avatar doesn’t necessarily need to be a human body; it can be anything, a tree, an octopus, a dog, or a robot. As long as we can map users’ behaviors with the avatars' motion, people will intuitively know how to control their body shells. This connection between the avatar and the device will allow users to gain body ownership, which is the first step toward a sense of being in a digital world.
Virtual Authority
What is their superpower here? How can they bring up the control panel that assists their works? How can they customize the world based on their preference? Let users know what they are capable do and how to get access to those powers.
A good VR control system is like the air we breathe, but we can’t notice it. It is necessary, but it can fade away for more important things going on in that world.
Q2: What can I do?
What is the truth of the world?
The Configuration of the Space
To construct the virtual space skeleton, I always ask myself: What do I want my users to know/do/feel in this space. And the answer will determine the configuration of the space.
Nature on the earth is the best teacher to me when it comes to design virtual space. Nature shapes us. People like James J. Gibson who study “ecological psychology” termed by James reveal how ecology affects our behaviors and emotions. The book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by James introduces 8 main categories of terrain and how they affect people’s locomotion.
Similarly, in the architecture design domain,
There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.”
— Winston Churchill,
A good environment setup is critical for people’s willingness to stay. Turn to the first chapter of the Bible, where you will see how God created us and everything. Add light and dark, sky and ground, ocean and mountain, animals and plants, women and men. I guess this version of the world design is a huge success because most of us don’t want to leave. A successful virtual space design should at least try to do a similar thing. We as designers shape the virtual universe, then the universe shapes us, our users. It is our responsibility to provide the right shape.
Here are some parameters we need to tune for achieving the right vibe:
- Open space or confined space
- Day or night or customized color
- On the ground or in the air
- The scale of the object
- Living creatures: moving or static.
Make sure the space is psychologically comfortable.
The right size is also important. Do consider: what limits of body and mind of humans and limits of devices we should respect and take into account?
The Science of the Virtual World
At this stage, we have finished the assembly of the gears of a virtual world. Now, let’s design the method for interacting with it.
In the real world, the method is revealed by Science — our knowledge of how this world works. And it can be simplified into two types of things :
- doing A will cause B
- or if A happened, then B has the odd of 75% to happen.
Such causations and correlations are the cornerstones of our survival. When you see a panel with a handle in the wall, you’ll instantly know it is the door🚪, and you properly can make a pretty good guess at how to open it. We don’t need to learn every detail. We make predictions and react to things based on the knowledge developed from our past experiences. By utilizing experience-generated knowledge, an artificial object with good design can suggest to you how to interact with it through its shapes, materials, or physicalities. It saves us a lot of brain works to deal with this ever-changing commercial world. In the design domain, we say that this product provides affordance.
Now transit to the virtual world, we need to A. Build up new causations and correlations. B. Build up affordance to mentally accommodate our virtual residence
A typical example of visual affordance in the digital world is: An object highlighted in yellow can be attached to the virtual hand by pressing the A button on the controller. When success triggers accumulate, users start to learn, and believe the object highlighted in yellow is always grabbable. Such causation will be added to their mental maps of how to act and react in this world.
A virtual world full of affordances will promote an autonomous learning process for our users. Every time they emitted an event, they make predictions of the output. And if the prediction matches the actual system feedback, they will learn that is the right way to do it and then develop a sense of control, which is key to their mental accommodation in this virtual world.
There are a lot of other Elements that can provide affordances:
- Haptics
- Sound
- Visual
- Shape
Find your own recipe. Define the affordance and apply it to the design of interactive objects
Q3: Why am I here?
What is the value or the meaning of this virtual life?
The fictional elements that evoke a sense of being in a virtual world should support the values and believes of the new world. Users can be here to do something or do nothing, learn or leisure, social or alone. Then, let them feel such an experience is meaningful and there is a certain value vibrating in the background.
The Under Presents app I mentioned earlier got this. I resonate with the value it provides. I can see a whole new possibility of social VR where people can connect with other players with not many social activities required, and it is safe and fun.
However, Multiplayers are not Jack of all trades to retain users for VR products. Instead, some apps might want to create a world for a single user and let them play the God role, like The Journey of God.
All that matters is the value of being in this world aligns with our users’ expectations, and they shall stay.
To wrap up, the rules of thumbs for shaping a virtual universal:
- An unobtrusive world that leaves room for the user’s self-expression.
- Build up trust. Let users believe in the virtual self, the virtual objects, the virtual world, and more importantly, the value behind everything.
- Use our world design as a reference, don’t go too far away from it. Yes, in virtual reality, users are free from physics, but that doesn’t mean that we need to discard all of that.
- Keep Ergonomics in mind. Make users physically comfortable.
- Cautious of the psychological comfort.
More importantly, consistency is key. Be strict when following rules to create new objects or interactions.
I feel like those things I have discussed so far are also applied to MR AR design, but to MR AR, there are more constraints when removing certain attributes of the real world since we don’t much control over how users set up their room and where they will use the product.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for your attention. The process of typing those thoughts here really helps me to sort out some of the messes in my mind.
I hope it can inspire you to make the right design choice in such a picky market. And more importantly, make the right design choice that can shape the future of the virtual world in a good way.
Ps: all illustrations are from me.
Hi, I’m a VR/ AR UX Engineer, been in this industry for six years as a designer, researcher, and developer. Feel free to leave your valuable thoughts here.
If you are also interested in VRARMR, let’s connect at
My Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yu-qin-01a41212a/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EllenYQin
Glad to meet you here！
