Virtual Reality (VR) brings many possibilities. You can explore massive lands, fly in a spaceship, experience what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes, and more. With all the new possibilities, there need to be some ways to handle interactions with the user. The way how we currently handle interactions via buttons and HUDs (Head-up Display) are not ideal for VR. Therefore, there need to be new ways for interactions in VR.

My goal in this post is to highlight some of the design choices you must consider when developing for VR in order to offer the best possible user experience.

Height and Accessibility

Make sure your VR experience accounts for various height. Can both a child and adult have the same experience? Does the difference in their height make it so the child cannot reach key points of interest in your VR experience? What about someone that is sitting down or in a wheelchair? An easy way to deal with height problem is to add in a setting and then move objects around based on the set height.

You also need to consider how the mechanics of your VR experiences work. If your VR experience requires the user to perform certain gestures or postures, make sure it is achievable for many people. Offer alternatives for those that cannot perform gestures or postures.

Prevent Motion Sickness

One of the most important factors to a great user experience is whether the user gets sick. No matter how many things your VR experience gets right, if it induces motion sickness for your users, then they will not find it enjoyable. Therefore, it is crucial that you develop your VR experience with motion sickness prevention in mind.

The best thing that you can do to help avoid motion sickness is to always maintain the ideal frame rate for VR, which is 90. There are other tips and tricks that you can incorporate to prevent motion sickness, but maintaining at least 90 frames-per-second (FPS) is the most important. I have a post about preventing motion sickness when developing for VR if you want to find out more.

Room-Scale

Designing for room-scale VR can get complicated. The biggest problem you will face is that everyone will have a different size play area. If you designed your VR experience to require a certain play area size, then you are limiting who can try out your VR experience. Therefore, if possible you should have two versions of your VR experience. One for room-scale and another for stationary.

Locomotion

The way in which the user can navigate the VR environment will have a huge effect on their overall enjoyment. It is important to get your locomotion (movement) system right because it can make the difference between motion sickness or not.

One of the most popular movement methods is teleportation. It integrates into VR without hurting the immersive factor of the VR experience by much. In addition, teleportation allows users with a small play area to navigate a large VR world.

Robo Recall – teleportation with trajectory

I have a post about various locomotion methods if you want to learn about other options.

Directing Attention

Unlike traditional video games where you can control the user’s camera; for VR you should almost never control the camera. The user should always have control on where to look at all times. With that in mind, how can you get the user’s attention?

Lighting

You can use lighting to draw attention to key points in your VR experience. For example, spotlights are useful to identify to the user areas of interest or objects you want them to focus on. You can light up the VR environment with a mixed of lit and unlit areas to passively help guide the user along the correct path.

Objects

Objects that the player can interact with should be within reach and is visible within their field of view (FOV). You can add visual effects to objects to indicate them as a point of interest. For example, you can highlight objects when the user is near to indicate that they can interact with it.

Job Simulator – object highlight and interaction

Spatial Audio

Audio provides a passive stream of information to the user that tells them about the surrounding. For example, audio can let the user know where something is located and where the action is happening.

Using spatial audio, you can direct the user to the point of interest. Carefully placed sound effects can help direct attention to important events even when there are attention-grabbing visuals happening.

User Interfaces

User interfaces (UI) are drastically different in VR. They need to be three-dimensional and interactive. This means the UI needs to be made with three-dimensional objects. In addition, text does not work well in VR so you must use a different approach such as graphics.

I expect you to die – UI interface

Environment

The scale of the objects in the VR environment conveys different messages. For example, when objects are small, they are cute and toy-like. It makes the user want to interact (pick up) with it. When the objects are large, it makes the user feel that they need to walk around it. Lastly, objects can be scaled to be life-size, which makes the user believe that the object really exists.

Besides scale, the settings in the environment are important too. If you are going for something happy, keep the environment brighter. If you are going for more along the line of horror, keep the lighting dim.

I hope you found this post helpful. If so, share it with others so they can benefit as well.

This list of design choices is definitely not inclusive. Are there other considerations that you believe would be a great addition to the post? Which of these design choices have you dealt with?

Leave a comment or send me an email at steven@brightdevelopers.com. To stay in touch, you can follow me on Twitter.