The Laws of Simplicity Applied to VR
3. Time
Savings in time feel like simplicity.
Coordinating travel with friends or colleagues can be frustrating and time-consuming. But in VR it doesn’t have to be.
Every other year my brothers and I travel off the beaten path. From diving with whale sharks in Mozambique, hiking a jungle trail in Peru, or swimming with jellyfish in Palau, the roughest part of every adventure is always travel coordination. Getting three people that live in different parts of the world to the same place at the same time, and then going together from one destination to another for some reason is always harder than it sounds.
The same is true in VR today — coordinating group VR activities takes more time than it should. The experience varies depending on the platform or activity, but roughly it goes like this: first you create a party and invite people into VR. Once people have their headsets on, you choose what to do together and make sure everyone in the group buys, downloads, and successfully installs the VR app you are about to join. Then you launch the apps and hope you will all land in the same spot — as some applications have different rooms or locations, there may be an extra step of finding each other before we can start the activity. Want to do something else? Start all over again.
While some of these steps are hard to simplify — like making sure everyone is online at the same time — we could definitely “shrink” the perception of time, making the experience feel shorter and more tolerable. For instance, by making smart recommendations based on who is online and the apps they own cuts out the time for people to join, buy, and download apps. Or by showing the virtual location of each party member before joining the activity, cuts coordination time to get to the same spot. Or by simply making transitions between VR applications smoother, so you don’t have to wait in a dark environment staring at the app logo while waiting for it to load.
I realize that some of these suggestions may sound obvious and that there are harder problems to solve for improving the experience of traveling together in VR. But as Dr. Maeda’s book suggests, when we can’t make the experience simpler, we can at least make it feel simpler by minimizing the perception of time. Traveling can be hard work but should feel like fun — especially in VR.
The Laws of Simplicity Applied to VR
Introduction: Inspired by John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity.
- Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
- Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
- Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
- Learn: Knowledge makes everything simple.
- Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
- Context: What lies on the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
- Emotion: More emotions are better than less.
- Trust: In simplicity we trust.
- Failure: Some things can never be made simple.
- The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
