Virtual Pioneers
Navigating the 3D Frontier, or: A Practical Guide to Designing for Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) is incredible at letting people experience (literally) unbelievable things. But wait, your product strategy doesn’t involve swimming with digital whales or launching fireballs from your fingertips?! Then how could your application possibly exist in a 3D world of limitless possibilities? After spending a year in headsets we have some pointers for those trying to make the leap from flat screens to three dimensions.
Companies are struggling to figure out how to take the first step. Some are dipping their toes in the space by simply translating their desktop or mobile offerings to large screens in a 3D environment (think of a digitally cloned home flatscreen). While an okay start, there are simple and effective design elements that can help create a more native, impactful experience without mimicking scenarios and settings meant for a 2D world.
There are some new challenges when thinking about designing an experience for your product or service in VR:
- Working with 2D content in a 3D space
- Understanding how brand can be expressed in VR
- Designing seated or passive experiences
- Translating your design system for content presentation
- Defining an interaction language that feels native to VR
- Ergonomics
- Sound design
- Motion sickness
- …the list goes on
There are also benefits to VR that don’t just apply to entertainment experiences:
- Immersive and non-disruptive (allows for mono-tasking)
- User’s experimental mindset
- Spatial awareness
- No screen edges, boundless space
- Depth
- New organization metaphors
- Empathy — see from another viewpoint
At Tectonic we work on multi-platform design systems with an emphasis on how they translate across a variety of form factors. This means that during the last year we’ve spent a lot of time with our headsets on, exploring how to help brands translate their offerings to VR. Here, to save you some time and headache (which happens in virtual reality), are some practical ideas and advice for how to tackle the problems and take advantage of the benefits of this young paradigm. We’ll touch on 3 main areas:
- Content Layout (specifically with 2D content)
- 3D Interactions
- Visual Design & Mood
Part 1: Creating Magic with Layout
The magic of a lush 360 degree environment quickly becomes a tired novelty if you’re unable to explore and interact with it. In addition, what if your content doesn’t consist of 3D objects but instead data, text, and 2D images? It’s through these constraints that we can begin to explore the other benefits and capabilities of VR.
Instead of designing a beautiful environment and restricting content to a big screen within it — how can we design the layout of the content to be more native to VR? If we focus on a simple action like browsing a gallery of photos, we can play with a layout that goes beyond the traditional format and lives comfortably in a 3D space.
Alternatives to Screens in VR
Here are a few concepts that go beyond large screens and take advantage of VR’s unique capabilities:
- Break up the UI in Z-Space — One of the most exciting things about VR is the ability to feel depth and parallax. This is unlike any other medium — therefore the UI should not be restricted to living on one plane.
2. Comfortable layouts — Have content wrap around you just beyond your periphery. This takes advantage of the cinematic feel of VR without urging the user crane their neck at uncomfortable angles.
3. Create a physical breadcrumb when browsing content in space — Use left and right space in addition to depth to model the user’s path through the content’s information architecture. As the user digs deeper into content it unfolds to the right and moves closer to them. This can create a mental model for how to move up and down in a content hierarchy.
4. Ground plane — Gazing down is often more comfortable than looking up — even if that means your content should break below the virtual floor. It’s important to ground the user on a floor but does it need to be the same level across the entire world?
5. Bring content front and center to the user — When you are seated it feels better to have content move to you versus artificially moving towards the content via teleportation.
6. Divide the space into zones — Use the users periphery zones for secondary information.
Keep in Mind
- Distance and size are subjective — For key interaction spaces allow the user to resize and move objects and elements further or closer to them.
- 270 Degrees of interaction — Don’t let the user feel like they are missing out on anything
- Spacial Relationships — Think in terms of personal space, action space, and vista space when designing environments and interactions
- Ground the user — The experience can feel uncomfortable if there is no ground plane. For scenarios where content breaks below the ground plane, use a small disk plane for the user to stand/sit on within the experience, this will help ground them. Alternatively, adding a horizon line (real or implied) in the background can add stability to a scene.
Conclusion
Creating a VR experience is an opportunity to explore a new platform with the potential to impact people in a whole new way. However, without tried and true design patterns, it’s difficult to translate your product or service to this new medium and generate the desired immersive experience.
At Tectonic, we believe each challenge is an opportunity to invent something new. This article touched on some opportunities for content layout. Keep an eye out for the next two parts of our series where we will explore 3D interactions and how to approach visual design for VR. Through this combination we can start to establish brand identity in a way that feels immersive and native to the medium.
Written by Leslie Ferguson, Artwork by Gretchen Nash
