The Laws of Simplicity Applied to VR
7. Emotion
More emotions are better than less.
VR interfaces should play a part in keeping people immersed in a virtual experience.
Your first VR experience will stick with you forever. Mine was in the south of France, during the Cannes advertising festival. There was a Samsung booth with dozens of people lining up to hop on a virtual roller coaster, powered by the company’s Gear VR headset plus a synchronized robotic seat row that moved and shook for an extra kick of reality. I remember my hands locking onto my seat, not being able to let go when going downhill. Part of my brain was telling me — don’t be an idiot, this is not real — but the other part, a much stronger and visceral part, was commanding HOLD ON TO YOUR LIFE. After that I had many other memorable experiences, like watching an entire Vance Joy live concert from up on stage, or having my first close encounter with a massive T-Rex in a museum hallway. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that these experiences changed my life as I got so hooked on VR that I decided to drop everything and design VR interfaces.
Emotions are the reason people join VR. We want to feel immersed in a place we can’t go otherwise or to feel someone’s presence when that someone is physically out of reach. So while VR interfaces need to be simple, they should strive for never breaking the magical feeling of immersion. This does not mean adding bells and whistles — in fact, quite the opposite. It means designing interfaces to blend in, to feel like they belong in the immersive space, so much that you are oblivious to them. Like when you are in a movie theater, everything that competes with the big screen becomes a distraction, taking away from the experience.
There are a few ways to keep a VR interface from breaking immersion. First — and perhaps the most technically challenging — is to make it contextually aware so it never collides with the virtual environment or the objects in it. A navigation bar that appears cutting through the body of a T-Rex is a mind-bending distraction. Second, using subtle geometry and materials that help the interface blend in. Adding a bit of volume to flat surfaces can help them feel real in an environment where everything else is tridimensional, while reflective materials can make the interface more integrated with the virtual environment lights. Note that if for technical reasons you can’t add geometry and materials to the interface, do not try to fake it. Fake depth, lighting or shadows immediately stand out in a six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) experience — it just looks silly. Third, adding spatial sound design is the icing on the cake to make a visual interface look, feel, and sound immersed.
There is a good reason why you don’t see these tricks applied to most VR interfaces today: they take away memory that could be used in the actual VR experience. But as VR hardware evolves and memory becomes less of a constraint, I believe designers and artists will have an opportunity to collaborate and create delightfully immersive virtual interfaces. As Dr. Maeda’s book suggests, the fundamental distinction between art and design is that art makes you wonder while design makes it clear — and in VR, you should get both.
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.
