How To Design For Immersive VR Experiences?
A badly designed VR experience can not only be ineffective or boring but can even cause bodily harm. These experiences are made keeping the latest technology in mind however, fail to meet some basic requirements i.e.communicate the brand message and expand the user’s imagination and experience. It is imperative to keep the user in the centre and design the entire experience around them.?
There is a need to learn how to carry out the design processes for VR experiences as their use becomes more widespread. VR experiences are 3D therefore, unlike 2D interfaces there are many more factors to be taken into account while designing. In VR the experience shifts from 3rd person to 1st person narrative. Therefore content and UI need to be rethought.?
The first step in any XR experience should be to understand presence, which is accomplished when the user genuinely feels “pulled-in” into an experience. It is a feeling that makes one belong to a location. In VR, presence is deeper than in AR or MR. The user is no longer in the real world but is teleported to a new virtual world. The deeper the presence the richer the storytelling should be. Ultimately the user has to be a changed person after the experience.
The Problem With Presence
If we don't clearly define the user's location, they might not feel like they are somewhere particular, which would provide a significant barrier to the rest of the intended experience and create an unsettling sense of disorientation. The presence of a user indicates their current location. The more explicitly you can establish a presence, the more engaging the user experience will be. With presence, the user experiences the virtual world through an actor's perspective, losing the third-person perspective. When designing for presence, there are several things to consider. The first factor is sensory modality (types of inputs). The user may feel a higher amount of presence with the right combination of visual, aural, gesture, and haptic input, but not if it feels forced. Multimodal interactions must be thoughtfully planned by designers to seem valuable and pleasurable. The objective should be to create an experience that is fluid, cohesive, multimodal, and appropriately engages a variety of senses.
This is crucial for creating the illusion of place. Users start to reach out and touch things as if they were there when they engage their senses in the created experience the same way they would in real life, without hesitation and, most crucially, without questioning the mechanics required to pursue their desired activities. It's critical to make sure that answers to the user’s actions are as expected in addition to developing multimodal VR interactions.
The first 30 seconds are important.?
Let's begin with the user's initial 30 seconds of the encounter. In terms of presence, that's a pretty wonderful place to start. It is critical to pique the user's interest and catch their attention in the first 30 seconds of the experience, while they are considering whether to remove their headset or stay. To do this, make sure your environment has animated cues, preferably in a subtle way, from the very first scene in your design.
This method takes advantage of the scientific fact that people are more drawn to moving objects in a setting than they are to motionless ones.?
Curiosity is crucial in that situation. Curiosity is what is being stimulated. And that's a highly effective first emotion to pique someone's interest, right? It's the north star that guides the user into the experience. One has to keep in mind that the character in a VR experience is the user. They are co-authoring the narrative.?
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Most VR games today simply ignore this. Which results in disorientation and low engagement. Curiosity and affordance (all the things the user can do), these two elements must be clear to the user in the first 30sec of the experience.
Understanding the user’s FOV (field of vision)?
In contrast to 2d flat screens, the field of vision in VR can have an infinite viewing area. In theory, the user can turn their body 360 and neck left-right, up-down. However, the more movement you add the more tedious the VR experience becomes.?
The size of the visible environment that you can see at any given time is referred to as your field of view in a broad sense. Your field of vision when utilising your eyes is from one edge of your peripheral vision to the other. Your field of vision changes when you turn your head, but it doesn't get wider. The objective of a VR headset is to provide you with the widest field of vision (FOV) possible, but there is no purpose in designing a FOV that is broader than what the human eye can see.
A study was done on the FOV of users in 3d space. Users were made to experience virtual worlds with 360 FOV, 180 FOV and 90 FOV. The users in the 90 FOv would recall maximum information. Does that mean less is more? Seems like it, at 90 FOV we have less information to render and more to remember. It is a win-win!
Another useful technique used by head-mounted displays (HMDs) is foveated rendering. It requires eye tracking to reduce the rendering workload by greatly reducing the image quality in the peripheral vision (outside of the zone gazed by the fovea)
It is all about telling a story!
One needs to develop storytelling, improvising, and imaginative skills to create engaging narratives for VR. We've learned from our VR design projects over the past few years that 3D storytelling is essential to the. One needs three skills to approach the user experience of VR:
Experience design will benefit from a new thoughtful inventiveness when designing for VR. One will be able to increase the number of ways one can assist users to interact with interactions, events, UI components, and the overall narrative by using the above-mentioned techniques. We will go deeper into certain topics in our future posts. So do follow to know more!?