Virtual Reality: Made in milliseconds

by Camilo Soto

This is part four of a month-long series on VR. Check out parts one, two, and three.

There are tons of virtual reality headsets coming out in the next year. How do they trick your mind into thinking you’re looking at a 3D space? What are the specs you need to make sure you don’t get sick?

Made in milliseconds

3D is produced by showing two different images to each eye to simulate what your eyes would normally see. It tricks your brain into thinking you’re present in a digitally produced environment. It sounds pretty simple, but in order to actually allow a person see what they would naturally see in a different environment, the image that they are looking at needs to be updated between 40 and 60 times per second, keeping track of exactly what they’re looking at.

This means that in a matter of milliseconds, the headset needs to figure out the user’s position and orientation, pass this information to the computer, and the computer in turn needs to produce an image that matches what the world would look like from that specific point in space.

Sony’s Project Morpheus touted

Advances made during the last decade in a number of fields have made it possible to produce a sense of “presence” that would have been impossible before. High resolution, high quality display technologies, and a push forward by the mobile phone market have made it possible to make portable “retina” quality screens that look great even when placed mere inches from your eyes.

Valve claims no one has gotten motion sickness while using the HTC Vive.

Sensor technologies such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, miniaturized and optimized for use in motion controllers and mobile devices, make it possible to track movement and orientation very accurately and very fast. Last, but not least, advances made in CGI for the entertainment industry make it possible to create very realistic real-time renderings of imaginary environments. Put these elements together and you have a portable headset capable of actually making a person feel like they’ve been transported to another world.

In the VR arms race, developers are trying to differentiate their hardware by claiming it has the lowest refresh rate, highest resolution, or lowest latency.

Limitations on interaction

VR has been pushed forward very strongly by the gaming industry, but its application in gaming is still somewhat blurry. The reason for this is that even though you may be capable of creating the illusion of being in a fantasy world, you still need to solve the issue of allowing the player to act upon it.

This is where the controllers come in, but you can’t exactly let the player move around using their full body when they’re blinded to the physical world they’re moving around in. We’ve all seen the youtube videos of where that can lead. Solutions have been implemented using harnesses, rolling floors and dedicated rooms that track the user, but that’s very far from practical and ages away from becoming mainstream enough that making content for this platforms sounds like a good business proposition. There will always be classic controllers which gamers are used to, but can you really expect them to go through a long play session without being able to see the controller they’re using?

That leaves us with a technology that allows people to immerse themselves in an environment, but with very little capability to do much more than spectate. That sounds an awful lot like another huge branch of entertainment, where you look but don’t touch: cinema. Therefore, some of the first popular experiences in VR are bound to be experiences where you’re just an audience, immersed in a world in which things are happening, but unable to act on them.

Initially, VR’s strength will be experiences that allow users to navigate environments that would otherwise be unreachable, allowing them to effect changes that would be impossible in real life. You could for instance allow people to navigate their new home before it’s built, changing the furniture, the paint or the time of day. The big question right now is whether there’s going to be a wide adoption of the technology for household use, or if it’s going to be the type of thing that you run into at the mall as a curiosity.

The bottom line is VR is just a platform, a new display technology, and the most defining factor in it’s success and meaningfulness will be the content and experiences available in it.

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Virtual Reality: Let’s not replace reality… yet

This is part three of a month-long series on VR. Check out parts one and two.

There’s nothing new about Virtual Reality. It’s not that it’s an obscure technology that has been under dark basements all this time. I remember playing Heretic and Doom on VR systems in the 90’s; but now, thanks to many factors, VR tech is (almost) reaching the level of being accessible to the common man.

Currently, there’s a fistful of companies that are trying to push their own tech on the VR dream. Some are even located between the blurred lines of the industry, like Microsoft HoloLens that is more Augmented Reality than Virtual Reality, but follows the momentum of the Not-Real-Reality zeitgeist. Most of these efforts will die, and that’s ok. Everyone’s pitching their own ideas, and at the end, the most convenient and popular will survive, or maybe not (looking at you, VHS and Blu-Ray).

Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was released in 1995, and was discontinued six months later.

How do we interact with VR?

Whoever wins the arms race, what we really expect to reap are behavior standards. That is what concerns us as experience architects. Right now, all VR efforts have pretty much only one behavior in common: You can turn your head and perceive the virtual-augmented environment around. All the other basic elements of the experience and how you interact (if you can) with this environment vary. We are not talking about some basic button to push here, we are talking about stuff that aims to compete with reality itself.

LeapMotion attaches to Oculus Rift and tracks your hand movements.

VR needs an equivalent of Xerox mouse or Apple’s touch gestures on the first iPhone. An easy way to interact with the world that VR is promising, that is easy to use and quick to learn. One will think that because VR aims to involve the entire self, body gestures are an easy way to go on this, after all, finger gestures quickly became a standard, so this should be like the next “step”. But time has proven that it’s not really cool to waste your energy moving your arms around to do a simple action that can also can be done with a simple finger movement, like when we tap or click on a mouse.

Right now there are a lot of options that aim for the title of standard, or at least the better option. From complete stations that let the user feel like he’s walking in a single place to motion sensors and simple hand controls. All of those have been borrowed from the world of videogames; a world that has been dreaming with VR for decades.

Since the Nintendo Wii made popular the revolutionary “Wiimote”, it seemed that it was possible to create a decent body interaction with potential VR systems. But that’s for games, and you can only play boxing like that for some time before you get tired. Some experiences require less physical immersion and more of a sensorial experience.

Start Simple

If VR wants to aim to any kind of public and be a platform for a wide arrange of products, it needs to start simple before it gets complex. I bet somebody will want the complete “Lawnmower Man” battle station at home, but maybe companies need to aim low to hit high for now, stop pretending to replace reality itself.

Still, VR is still a technology with a potential to be as immersive as anything anyone has ever experienced, so simple interactions still need to be on the level of the potential that the device is promising. We don’t want to break immersion using the same Xbox controller we use for games on a flat screen. We want interactions that can go from a jump to the movement of a finger, and compact and precise enough so you don’t have to take the kids out of their room to build a VR place where you can do all that.

Maybe Facebook with the Oculus have another vision of what the market could want more than Valve+HTC, but for now, what we need is to start seeing the results of all those ideas on the public and see how they (and we) react.

In these infant times of an old technology, we can’t demand to have epiphanies of how things are going to be forever. We expect evolution, and as designers, is our duty to give those ideas challengers and opportunities, embrace chaos and don’t be afraid to fail. It’s time to aim for the moon, we will reach for the stars next… from the comfort of our sofas… using our VR headsets.

Let us know what you think about User Experience in VR by tweeting @zemoga!

Virtual Reality: Look, but don’t touch

This is part two of our month-long coverage of VR and You (catchy right? not really). Check out our high-level VR landscape summary from part one.

It’s funny, I tend to be someone who is really hesitant about most new technologies. Once people find out that I work in product development/strategy, they’re usually shocked by this fact. I think it comes down to a way of thinking: Do you think like a customer or a marketer? As well as the idea of right place and right time. Remember Microsoft created a tablet and “smart”watch years ago, but it never stuck. Would argue that right place and time got last due to many factors: hardware, software, and execution.

Virtual Reality for Marketers

I can see why the Marketer loves new technologies. Unfortunately, it’s been the lowest common denominator in terms of thinking when it comes to how to monetize a product. If you can’t figure how to monetize then, “we can always sell ads”. More screens just means more ways for people to push things you don’t want into your face. I tend to think like a consumer as much as possible in the development of any strategies or products. That usually means thinking “where am I experiencing the friction? How can I make a decision faster? How does this thing entertain or benefit me?”

VR is great because there aren’t a whole lot of ways for traditional marketers to leverage it, even though they are trying. At Zemoga we build stuff. So we love the prospect of building experiences for our clients on VR. Letting an experience add value/entertainment to the end user is the best form of marketing.

Virtual Reality for Brands

So what does that mean for you, Brand? How can you leverage VR? Well, you have to ask yourself a couple questions:

Am I poised to support VR strategy post launch of my VR initiative?
Is what I am trying to create capable of being better experienced IRL?

The answer to these questions for most is probably, “no”.

A great example is what Audi recently did with VR.

In short, the VR experience helps give the potential Audi driver a sense of what it’s like to be inside the car. You see where this is going right?

Why would I need have the “experience” of a door shutting or the sound of the audio system? Wouldn’t the best way to provide that be from actually sitting inside one of their gorgeous cars? Listening to their incredible sound system and feeling the engine as I press on the gas. I love Audis, but is the Audi so out of reach for most customers that VR would help convert on a purchase? Or heighten the experience? I would argue “no”.

I can see VR being very applicable, however, for the customer looking to buy a Gulfstream G650. There is no way to know what a custom G650 looks like because they are built from scratch for their customers. Sure, I can see inside one that’s already been built, but every Gulfstream jet has literally millions of configurations internally (they have over 2,000 types of leathers to choose from alone). VR could be a great way to help a buyer see exactly why they’re spending 100 million dollars.

Virtual Reality makes sense as the next step for Gulfstream’s DesignBook

The type of person looking to spend $70-120k on an Audi, however, wants to sit in that Audi, because it’s a product that isn’t that far out of reach or that provides so many custom details that even a base model S8 couldn’t communicate it’s value. Also, they aren’t in short supply. Every local dealer will keep these products on site, they’ll even come pick you up in one. So again, the IRL experience is far better than the VR one could ever be. So to me, this VR play was nothing more than a PR play. That isn’t to say it’s a bad thing, but it only adds value to the brand, not the consumer. I know you can make the “customer perception argument”, but the VR experience isn’t going to make the close. It’s going to be sitting behind the wheel of that S8 that will make them choose it over the Mercedes S class.

This is the reason why the gaming industry is running full speed ahead with VR. It’s their job to create worlds we could never experience IRL. Environments that don’t truly exist IRL made possible to experience through VR.

Does this mean as a brand you shouldn’t be thinking about and playing with VR? Absolutely not. You should be investing time into how the tech works and looking to explore ways to bring experiences to life for your customers. Just let this governing strategy guide you:

Can the experience we want to create be better IRL? If the answer is “yes,” move on to another idea.

Next week we’re going to hit on part 3, which is about UX and VR. Be sure to check back in and be sure to tweet at us if you love or hate what we said @zemoga.

Chad

Virtual Reality: The future’s in your face

Ever since Oculus Rift’s Kickstarter made $2.5 million in 2012, virtual reality (VR) has been “the future.”