Guidelines for Creating Immersive Experiences
Some notes I wrote down while taking this course: IAT 445: Immersive Environments, from The VR Book.
Design
- Use aesthetic intuition to drive initial attraction and positive emotions.
- Use binaural cues with head pose to give a sense of sound location.
- Consider how the relative importance of depth cues varies as a function of distance. Some depth cues are more relevant at different distances.
Navigation
- Calibrate the system and confirm often that calibration is precise and accurate.
- To reduce risk of injury, design experiences for sitting. If standing or walking is used, provide protective physical barriers.
- If the highest-priority goal is to minimize VR sickness (e.g. when the intended audience is non-experienced VR users), then do not move the viewpoint in any way whatsoever that deviates from actual head motion of the user.
- Be careful about adding visual motion that results in users trying to incorrectly physically balance themselves in order to compensate for the visual motion.
- Never add visual head bobbing.
- For real-world panoramic capture, unless the camera can be carefully controlled, the camera should only be moved with constant linear velocity, if moved at all.
- When using analog sticks on a gamepad to navigate or when using other steering technique, it is best to have discrete speeds and the transition between those speeds to occur quickly.
- Design for physical rotation instead of virtual rotation whenever possible. Consider using a swivel chair (although this can be troublesome for wired systems).
- Be careful of the viewpoint moving up and/or down due to hilly terrain, stairs, etc.
Interfaces
- Design interfaces so users can work with their hands comfortably at their sides or in their laps with only occasional need to reach up high above the waist.
- Use text located in space instead of 2D heads-up displays so the text has a distance from the user and occlusion is handled properly.
- Consider getting a user’s attention first through spatialized audio to prepare them in advance for an event.
- Make interfaces intuitive by enabling complexity to be understood with the simplest mental model possible that can achieve the desired result, but not simpler.
Safety
- Inform users in a casual way that some users experience discomfort and warn them to stop at the first sign of discomfort, rather than “tough it out.” Do not overemphasize adverse effects.
- Do not freeze, stop the application, or switch to the desktop without first having the screen go blank or having the user close her eyes.
- After VR usage, inform users not to drive, operate heavy machinery, or participate in high-risk behaviour for at least 30–45 min and after all aftereffects have passed.