Designing VR for the audience experience

Consulting on Media Experiments for Katy Newton and Karin Soukop

Over ten weeks, we conducted 3 sets of experiments with over 40 participants. All of our experiments were lo-fidelity and analog, allowing us to adapt and respond to new questions as they arose. Photos: Karin Soukup and Alexandra Garcia

I consulted on the design of media experiments for VR, helped administer the tests and synthesize the cumulative findings.

You can find more about the experiments and the findings here.

About the project

To explore the audience’s experience in VR, we partnered with Stanford’s d.school Media Experiments, the National Film Board of Canada, and independent filmmaker Paisley Smith. To anchor the testing, we used scenes and locations from Paisley Smith’s VR documentary, Taro’s World. The documentary explores the death of her Japanese exchange student brother, Taro, and the impact his suicide had on the people around him.Taro’s World will be released in 2016 for mobile VR — Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR.

All of our experiments were low-fidelity and analog, allowing us to adapt and respond to new questions as they arose. Adapting a technique called “experience prototyping,” we created physical experiences in the real worldinvolving real people. These analog tests, rooted in an HCD approach, allowed us to learn about audience behavior quickly, inexpensively, and on a flexible timeline independent from that of VR developers and artists.

We mimicked the constraints of VR technology, restricting our participants’ movements and interactions to match the affordances of Google Cardboard. We created “magic goggles” (actually made of plastic, paper, tape and a front-facing camera) that limited the audience’s peripheral view while simultaneously recording their head movements.