Virtual reality: the new digital farwest

Why take an interest in virtual reality?

Thanks to technological advances in the smartphone sector as well as dedicated headsets, we are now on the cusp of a revolution in the virtual reality (VR) sector.
After the recent launch of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets, Google has announced having shipped 5 million of their Cardboard headset since its launch in June 2014. Meanwhile, research estimates that the VR market will grow to $22 billion by 2020.
This rapid evolution shows that it is important for us, designers, developers and advertisers to take a closer interest in this subject, which is good news as it promises to be exciting.

A new world to explore

VR is still in its infancy today. In this new far west it is necessary to reinvent our conception of interfaces and interactions. We have to ask ourselves what should a button look like? How to interact with? How do I enter text or provide information? How to move in space?
All over the world, teams are thinking about ways to consult and interact in this new environment. I also strongly recommend that you watch Mike Alger's video, VR Interface Design Pre-Visualization Methods.
Here are some examples of experiments carried out by the Google and Leap Motion teams.

An interaction test with the Leap Motion: To see more

A drum keyboard presented by Google teams at the last Google IO.

: The Daydream home interface

: A workstation

The benefits of VR

As we can see in the previous examples, VR opens up a new field of possibilities in the experiences we can design. It also offers us several advantages. Thanks to VR, we have the possibility of immersing the user in a state of immersion impossible on traditional media.
When we design interfaces for smartphones, for example, we have to think of usage scenarios ranging from 30 seconds to a few minutes at most. The user can easily be disturbed or need to perform other tasks. For VR, on the contrary, the user is most likely seated, in a calm and isolated environment. We must then design our experiments for a use that can be counted in tens of minutes. This length of experience is favored by the immersion capacity offered by this medium. The user is indeed immersed: his field of vision is completely filled, the sound is spatiality all around him and the virtual world in which he finds himself surrounds him completely.
Thanks to the new controllers that appear, VR also makes it possible to consider interactions never seen before. A VR experience can of course be controlled through traditional controllers such as a keyboard/mouse or a gamepad. Despite everything, it is thanks to new solutions that the field of possibilities opens up. We can notably cite the motion controllers of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, haptic gloves, jumpsuits following the whole body, etc. Truth be told, any object can now be turned into a controller.
Google designers notably presented an experiment in which they had transformed a watering can into a controller. It turned out that users were even more immersed and amazed when they could pick it up in-game and actually feel its weight.

Specific constraints

VR offers us real new possibilities, both in the lived experience and in the interactions. However, it is also accompanied by constraints that it is important to take into account in order to build a pleasant experience:
As cool as it may seem, an interface like that of Minority Report, asking the user to constantly keep their arms raised to interact will quickly cause great fatigue. It would only be usable for short sessions. We have to think about the muscle fatigue that can be caused by this kind of prolonged experience.

In the same vein, scattering the elements presented to the user will force him to turn his head regularly. It is therefore important to keep in mind the specificities of the support for which we are creating, in particular the width of the field of view available.

Finally, we still have to address the problem of motion sickness, also called motion sickness. It corresponds to a discrepancy perceived by the brain between the information sent by the ocular and vestibular systems.
Put simply, your vision clearly tells your brain that you are moving while your body senses stillness which causes feelings of nausea and loss of balance.
This problem is quite widespread in VR and is caused by several factors: loss of tracking of the movements of the user's headset, too low frame rate, movement of the camera not triggered by the user, etc...
Fortunately, solutions are beginning to emerge. One of the most important is related to the movement of the user within your application. Here are some examples to better understand the possible solutions:

Teleportation (example: Blink by Cloudhead): the user points to the place where he wants to go and after a fade to black, finds himself teleported to this place.
The use of a cockpit (example: Eve Valkyrie by CCP): the universe around you can move, if a part remains stable, like the interior of a cockpit for example, it seems that this solves the problem.
Placing a virtual nose: As surprising as it may seem, several studies have shown that placing a virtual nose in the middle of the screen can greatly reduce problems related to motion sickness.

To conclude, I would like to remind you that virtual reality is still a very young medium. As pioneers, we still have a lot to learn, discover and invent.
In the months and years to come, we will have to make progress on subjects as varied as 3D, photography (particularly the notions of depth of field and field of vision), motion design (how our elements move and appear in an interface without “edges”?) and 3D prototyping (on paper and on tools such as Unity or the Unreal Engine).

Resources

Videos

Baptiste Demarest, UX-Evangelist @UXRepublic

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