How to create a successful Virtual Reality project?
Virtual Reality has arrived and is being adopted by businesses to enhance their sales, marketing, HR, R&D, Training processes. And the medium is going beyond gaming to various industries from construction to health care and education.
An experience of working on Virtual Reality projects in different verticals has allowed us to understand some fundamental pointers on what can make a Virtual Reality project successful.
Familiarity with the medium — Virtual Reality
The first and foremost thing to do is to experience the Virtual Reality. Watching videos on YouTube isn’t going to help understand the medium. You need to be in the medium.
And this is true for your clients too. Showing them demo videos is only going to confuse them. They have limited understanding of the medium and its capabilities. And with variety of hardware available at different price points there expectations are ambiguous.
Set up an experience session for them to understand what it’s like to be in VR and dabbing around with virtual objects or teleporting. This will make them realize the potential and pitfalls of the medium.
VR experts come handy here as they been there done that. This allows to get kickstart on the project with minimal obstacles. VR experts because of their experience of working in variety of verticalls have done the necessary research and can recommend the best VR solution for your case.
I have developed a unique framework to understand the medium better with it’s potential and limitations. Experience of a unique set of apps in sequence can make anybody realize what VR has to offer and explore the possible outcomes for implementing VR for your business.
Going beyond the standards
Unlike flat screen interfaces VR offers a 360 space to place the UI and makes interactions possible in all the directions with 3D objects using direct controllers. Hence, the standard interaction patterns that work in flat screen interface may not be applicable and can limit the power of the medium.
Virtual Reality medium is almost similar to real world. However, being digital we have the power to tweak the rules of Nature and make things Fun. For example teleportation is such a nice use case of allowing users to quickly jump to far off points without having to walk. Similarly, far object snatch is another interaction of snapping the object lying far.
This requires a good amount of brainstorming and thinking out of the box. Body-storming is one of the amazing techniques to understand the limitations of real world and create supernatural solutions around them.
Setting up Goal for the medium
While VR is the new Fad in the market it has arrived at a stage that it can be used for utility. So just using VR to show off to the world of being innovative and trendy won’t work for a good VR project.
Understanding the end goal of the VR experience will drive a lot of design and development decisions. VR being a significant investment in terms of time and cost, it’s wise to understand the advantages and pitfalls before starting up.
The key to the success of your project is Determining what you want and how you want it done is.
Understand the audience
VR needs full body engagement or at-least head movement for total immersion. And this kind of experience is directly influenced by the physical characteristics and lifestyle of the audience who’s going to use it.
Profiling of the audience helps to define the hardware and the content to be designed for a good VR experience. Young audience will prefer physical freedom to experience the medium while standing against older audience who would prefer a seated experience.
User researchers can uncover a lot of untold needs of the users by employing tried and tested research frameworks.
Setup a content pipeline
VR is a 3D medium. Hence, the content also needs to be 3D. And 3D content generation is a rigorous process and effort. Even after completion a change can take some time to reflect in the final output.
And while the business processes are always changing, the reflection of VR projects can be and arduous task. Creating a VR project that’s static in nature can become a bottleneck to adjust to these changing needs. VR projects take major time in content creation, editing, client evaluation which is iterative. Client evaluations need to happen right on the VR devices.
This problem can be solved by creating a VR project that is able to adapt to the changing needs of content. By building a simple CMS through which even client is able to upload the content in the specified format a lot of extra costs is save later. Just like Wordpress, we need to have system in VR. There are some interesting tools like BrioVR, Varwin, VRframe.in that allows to make this possible. These tools make it easy to edit and update the content without disturbing the main application or to develop it from scratch at later point.
Another reason why companies give up on VR is that while their business processes are always changing, VR projects can’t reflect all of these changes. There is usually a time for edits and client evaluation right after the project is completed, but if business changes happen a year later, for example, the client would have to pay extra to get the project modified by professionals.
Measure efficiency
Measuring efficiency allows the management to understand the effectiveness of any given project. But how to determine efficiently in Virtual Reality. Some of the metrics like user retention and happiness are key factors to measure efficiency. User retention refers to user wanting to come back to the experience to learn and know more and happiness refers to an overall satisfaction compared to existing methods. Another important factor is reduction in error rate in respective field.
Take for example training a technician about machinery in VR. Existing tools are printed manuals, videos and images. With VR if the technician feels confident and makes less errors, then the project is bound to be successful.
However, for this it is necessary the parameters of efficiency are well defined when the Goal for the project is set.
