Three types of VR experiences and what UX designers can do for each
Creating engaging content for Virtual Reality requires various skills including User Experience design. Weak user experience is one of the key barriers to the mass adoption of VR applications. User experience for wearables in general, and for VR headsets in particular, is a two-fold concept. One side is physical comfort (ergonomics) while using the headset, its controllers, and other utilities. The other side concerns the soft aspects of digital experiences like app architecture and design. In this article, I refer to VR UX design with regard to the soft side of the experience. Here I will give you an overview of different types of VR experiences and where UX designers can play a role. In another article, I will explain the various possible roles that a UX designer can play to collaborate in creating a promising VR experience.
We can say that VR experiences can be of different categories based on the level of immersion, interaction, and the type of content.
1- Immersion is the common element of all VR experiences that there are still some disagreements on its exact definition. Some experts and professionals use the definition of presence and immersion interchangeably that is not accurate because it is possible to have a VR experience that can be immersive but the user might not feel present in another world. Some scientists like Witmer and Singer (1998) consider it a psychological concept that can be assessed subjectively and some consider it a technological one that can be assessed objectively. I am more inclined toward accepting the latter point of view and consider immersion as what Salter and Wilbur (1997) define as “the extent to which the computer displays are capable of delivering an inclusive, extensive, surrounding, and vivid illusion of reality”.
2- Adding “Interaction” to an immersive environment and the level of the interaction can impact the experience noticeably. Types of user interactions that have been tested so far include gaze, hand gestures/hand tracking, touch controllers or voice commands, or any combination of these.
3- Another important contributing factor in categorizing a VR experience is the origin of the content. Contents of the experience can be either fully computer-generated 3D objects, that can have various affordances for interactions, or it can be captured from the real environment, which only provides a passive observance experience for the user. We might also have a combination of both, but I believe any experience can fall into one of these two categories mentioned.
We can find VR experiences mostly in one of the 3 following categories:
1- Interactive Immersive 3D Environments:
Designers and developers can adjust the level of interactivity from low-interactions to highly-interactive based on the purpose of the experience. This type of experience can fall into either of the following categories or somewhere in between them:
- Game experiences (for entertainment purpose only)
- Serious-Game experiences (mostly used for educational purposes)
- Serious experiences (like social communication environments)
You can consider AltspaceVR as one of the best examples of this category in which you can communicate with real people, attend meetings and conferences, play games using 3D objects in the environment while feeling fully immersed in the space.
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Creating these types of experiences require interdisciplinary skills and UX designers can play a major role in designing and engaging experience for users.
2- Immersive 3D Environments:
The purpose of experiences in this category is to present some type of 3D created content with very limited (if any at all) interaction to the user. If there is any interaction, it is mostly through 2D User Interfaces and mostly for interactions that don’t affect the environment (like pause and play). For example, Immersive animations and live concerts can fall into this category.
Creating these types of experiences requires having skills in animation design, 3D modeling, development, and other design and development skills depending on the subject. UX design is not critical in creating these experiences but the platforms for showing them require good UX design. An example can be ‘The Multiverse Bakery’ from Studio Syro, which is a 10-minute short immersive animation with spatial audio.
3- Immersive Captured Environments:
This category is the least interactive experience in VR and mostly consists of 360 video or photos. Some researchers don’t consider these types of experiences as immersive either. However, this is one of the most popular experiences in VR for entertainment purposes. UX designers almost have nothing to do with creating these types of experiences but they can work on designing experiences for selecting and watching these kinds of content like the Youtube VR (with its corresponding Youtube channel). Felix and Paul Studio is one of the active examples of creating contents for this category of content. All the 360 videos and photos belong to this category.
