Designing for Virtual Reality
Designing for mobile and web will become like what wordpress has become for website developers.
Too mainstream, easy and mundane.
-Someone whispered in my ear and partially it is true.
And that is where one needs to keep himself/herself updated with the latest trends and futuristic technologies emerging in the market.
And IDF Bengaluru community is known for conducting such workshops that helps you in becoming a future proof designer and in that quest, this session was all about getting a first hand impression of VR technology.
This session was conducted in collaboration with Designerrs and BCG (Boston Consulting Group).
The speakers were Atul from Designerrs and Kumar Ahir, who is a self employed AR/VR evangelist.
In case if you missed that event, don’t you worry. The following section will cover the highlights of the event and key takeaways.
The session was divided into two halves. The first one gave an understanding of immersive experiences in theory and the other one was diving deep into the basics of VR technology.
Key Takeaways from first session:
- Immersive experiences means experiences which are highly engaging, interactive and inclusive in nature.
- One key learning that was the highlight of the session was that, “The number of senses involved is directly proportional to the level of immersion.”
Tenets of Immersive Experiences:
- Stimulated senses — the more number of senses you give to people, the more immersive it will be. In fact, there are companies coming up with accessories to stimulate more senses.
- Emotional bursts — moments where people do extreme things like breaking stuff and letting their frustration out.
- Living in the extreme — most people won’t pay for extreme adventures like skydiving; so, the VR experiences can give that rush to people; a lot of developers use “fear” as an element in VR
- Intense bonding — social platforms, wherever people & loved ones are involved
- Being what you want — people who want to project themselves; role playing; not being shy about how one wants to show them
- Resetting yourself — reset and come back to BAU (Business as Usual).
- Hitting nostalgia — this is a very immersive one; going down the memory lane
- Winning moments — where that brings out the happiness again.
- Unrestricted exploration — not restricted by anything like sketching, writing a poem, doodling. Basically a medium of escape.
These are the tenets of Immersive Experiences where VR can play a huge role.
Key Takeaways/Learnings from second session.
1. There are different immersive mediums and those are: AR | VR | MR | XR
2. These are differentiated with each other basis the level of immersion.
3. AR is least immersive of all and VR is the most immersive of the set.
4. Anatomy of a VR headset:
- FoV: Field of view: What you see.
- DoF: Degree of Freedom:
- 3 Degree of Freedom in X, Y and Z direction.
- 6 Degree of Freedom is when we add movement to the 3 Degree of freedom.
And then there are controllers/sensors/trackers: These are the devices that simulates the tap or click on the screen.
5. Types of VR:
- Mobile VR
- Stand alone VR
- Room scale VR (you’re able to walk in a room and use)
6. Different modes of interaction are:
- Gaze,
- Controller,
- Direct Hand,
- Combination of all.
7. To buy any VR headset, take care of following things:
- IPD: Distance between the center of the pupils of the eyes
- And focal distance.
8. While designing for VR experiences, take care of the fact that it is not only tech dependent but also body/age dependent.
9. Take care of giving the users a walkthrough or onboarding kind of a thing for the first 30 seconds. This will in turn help them getting acquainted with the system.
10. The elements in VR are measured in meters, fts or Inches.
11. Tools
- Brio VR — to prototype
- Vectary — web based 3D modelling tool
- Geometry — VR space content tool
- Unity (go to tool) — create any of this immersive experiences
- Web VR (JS, HTML)
How to make your first VR app?
Here are the steps:
- Sketch in the grid
- Take photo
- Crop
- Upload the image in https://vrframe.in using Firefox
- Then view it in the VR headset
Resources:
A huge shoutout to Surya from @twistopen for contributing such concise and well structured notes of the event. Make sure to connect with him on LinkedIn.
A huge shoutout to ArunKumar and Megha Chandrashekhar as well.
Gallery
P.S: This is just a summary of the event learnings and if you want to learn more about VR, Designerrs is coming up with a comprehensive course on VR. Make sure you check them out.
I also blog at UX Sprout. Have something interesting to share, hit me up for a coffee (on me). Connect with me here.
Thank you. Happy Learning.
