Why You Need to Start Ramping Up Your Career for VR, AR and Voice

In the 1980’s movie “Back to the Future,” the antagonist Biff found a way to predict the future, and used his special knowledge to get rich and take over Marty McFly’s home town. If you could predict the future, you would probably also take concrete steps to take advantage of this special knowledge, although perhaps not as selfishly as Biff. UX and product professionals are now in the unique position of having a high degree of certainty about a major technology shift that will take place over the next few years, dramatically changing human experience. We have a choice to make: take concrete steps now to get ready for it and benefit from it, or take a wait and see approach and play catch up after the wave hits.

User experience was born with screens, and has matured with screens. But digital experiences are starting to escape from behind the screen, to mix with, or completely replace, our perception of the world we live in. The world’s top companies, are investing heavily in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Voice technology, betting that adoption of immersive technology will be the largest platform shift since mobile phones broke into public awareness in the late 1990’s. In nearly every area of industry, innovative firms are starting to produce immersive experiences for their customers and employees. Conferences like XD Immersive (see https://bit.ly/2zDLNlP for info) are starting to prepare designers, product managers, and business strategists to create the vast range of new user experiences that will become available over the next few years.

The conceptual model of immersive technology is that you are not looking ‘at it,’ as you would a book or computer or other physical object, but that you are ‘in it.’ Through immersive technology you have a personal presence in a partially or fully digital, designed world. 

Immersive Technology Needs UX

Early stage developers are creating new ways of experiencing reality, from travel to medicine to education to sports and beyond. Since they are inventing a new reality, the possibilities are endless. However, what’s clearly missing from all this early stage development is the same voice that was missing in pre-millenium web sites: the user experience perspective. Technology can do more and more amazing things each cycle. But it will remain just a new technology until people get involved who are able to generate an understanding of what is important, compelling, and relevant from a user’s perspective.

Clearly UX professionals can provide this missing piece. However, there is not yet much demand for these skills from UX professionals in their day to day jobs, so as a whole, the UX community is taking a ‘wait and see’ approach to immersive technology. I think this is problematic for a few reasons.

1) It’s Closer Than You Think

The wait-and-see approach is based on the assumption that mainstream adoption of VR/AR/Voice technology is still pretty far off. Gartner has published a hype cycle diagram to illustrate where different technologies are in terms of the repeated pattern of hype, followed by a decrease in expectations, followed by long-term adoption. VR and AR are often lumped together with other forward-thinking technologies like connected home and blockchain, but Gartner’s findings as expressed in the hype cycle diagram are that VR and AR are significantly ahead of these other technologies in terms of being adopted and put to constructive use.

2) The Learning Curve is Probably Higher Than You Think

Many UX professionals and product designers assume they have plenty of time to adapt their skills to immersive technology. It’s easy to think about the learning curve that led to our current expertise, and assume that there will be a similar curve for learning how to plan, design and develop immersive experiences. This is very unlikely, unless you select an extremely specific niche to work in. The reason for the longer learning curve is that “experiences” designed for web sites and mobile phones are very basic compared with designing virtual and augmented reality experiences. The former replaced books and magazines and telephones, while the latter are enhancing or replacing physical reality as a whole. Understanding what is possible in this new medium and then learning how to design a new form of reality will take quite a bit of time. Below are some of the concepts that are involved in designing VR and AR experiences. I’ll describe these in more detail in future posts.

? The Concept of Presence: When you are using a web site, you are not in the web site. When you are in VR or AR, your location in the scene is part of the experience.

? The Concept of Identity: The user needs to have a virtual representation of themselves, and this person must be viewable by others as a distinct character. 

? Continuous Comparison to Physical Reality: The realism bar is much higher for VR and AR than it is for UX on screens

? Virtual World Creation: In VR, a virtual world completely replaces the physical world. In AR, the digital display over the real world has to make sense and be useful or entertaining

? Designing in 3D: This is a specialty skill today that will be required on a much larger scale in the future

? Position Tracking: Breadcrumbs for location in the information hierarchy vs. I glanced to the left and it didn’t look right

? Haptics: How to convey sensation and control in a digital environment

? Representation of Mobility: Users move from one place to another within the experience

? Lighting and Parallax: These are key aspects of human perception of physical reality. Our ability to detect different lighting and parallax patterns is very highly developed, and requires great skill to recreate. 

? New Types of Interactions: Instead of click, pinch and zoom, it’s conduct a surgery or fly a plane or learn to use a complex new power tool. 

? Physics: In a virtual or augmented world, force must remain proportional to mass and acceleration, unless you have a reason for making it otherwise

? Sound Design: In VR, sound design helps create the illusion of reality by mimicking a 3-dimensional environment. 

? User Anatomy: User anatomy, such as pupillary distance or positioning of hands, will play a much larger role in immersive experience design than it has in web and mobile experience design. 

? Permission to Shock: Immersive technology has the potential to have much more shocking impact on users because the scenarios they portray look much more real than other media. 

? Sensory Input: As realism increases, so will use of so-called 4D elements, i.e. hearing, smelling, touching and tasting. 

? Ethics: User experience designers have engaged in some ethical discussions, such as gender bias or dark patterns. But the availability of technology to meet a whole range of human needs in a realistic way is bound to bring a host of ethical questions with it. 

? Safety and Sickness: It isn’t uncommon for people using VR headsets for the first time to report feeling nauseous from the experience, or falling off a raised platform. 

3) Preparing Now Will Allow You to Do Work You Love 

VR and AR design involve a wide range of topics, activities and roles that were far less common in web and mobile experience design. If you start learning now, you can steer your career in a new or modified direction toward activities that you enjoy more than your current activities. It’s like we’re moving into a new building that is for the most part still unoccupied, and we can claim the office we want and get set up in it. Each of the immersive experience topics listed above represent a different set of activities that are probably quite different from what you do today. By starting to ramp up now, you can find the parts that really excite you, and then take that direction in your learning process. By the time these roles are in high demand, you will be ready. However, if you wait to move into your new area of expertise, the competition for your selected specialty will undoubtedly be much greater.

Dive In Now!

When e-commerce started in the 1990’s, there were many retailers that took a wait-and-see attitude. Amazon took a bold stance in the 1990’s and decided that the future of retailing was on the web. They invested heavily in digital technology, customer experience, and product reviews. Know any retailers that have paid the price for waiting? Having lived through a few of these technological Wild West scenarios in the past, I decided to do my best to help designers come quickly up to speed on what it will take to retool their careers for virtual and augmented reality. To this end, I’m organizing the aforementioned XD Immersive conference, which will take place in San Francisco, the epicenter of the VR/AR revolution on October 25 - 26, 2018. You can get the details at: https://www.uxstrat.com/xdimmersive. Join us and stake your claim in this exciting new world of immersive experience design!