Virtual Reality Design and Representation

VR Design: Overview Objectives, appropriateness Creating a VR application Designing a VR experience: goals, system, audience, tradeoffs, user, evaluation, documentation

Appropriateness Is VR the right medium Consider the goals of the project Some good candidates for VR: inherently 3D, must be real-time, multimodal, difficulty in other mediums, difficulty in experiencing first-hand (size or travel distance or restrictions), focused, safety issues, monetary issues

Creating a VR Experience Become familiar with VR applications If adapting from another medium, understand differences May adapt from another VR experience If creating new experience: team, experts in different areas, hardware/software system, create objects

Designing a VR Experience Top down: from goal to methods Test frequently Consider system resources and choose appropriately Design with venue in mind Consider your audience: age, experience, gender, culture Interface Paradigms: audience, expectations

Designing a VR Experience (con’t) Design tradeoffs: real-time, hardware, richness of modeled environment, complexity, learning curve Define user objective or goal: user is focus, narrative, interface that supports user objective End game: open-ended, story, goal, perpetual or non-timed, denouement Document and evaluate the experience

Representation of the Virtual World for Rendering: Overview Representation: –Quantitative and qualitative –Human perception –Verisimilitude –Semiotics –Choosing a mapping –Other issues Visual representation Aural representation Haptic representation

Representation or re-presentation Real world must be communicated virtually and so the choices for presentation are very important Modality choices Qualitative or quantitative information Human perception: generalization, experience, gender, age, transference of knowledge, analogy, culture

Verisimilitude Realism Mimetic: mimicking physical reality Diegesis: consistency within the world Realism axis: ranges from high realism to abstract – a continuum: verisimilar, scale- altered, property-altered, modality-altered, indexed (mapped to a new form), iconic (simplified objects), reified (abstract concepts represented by objects), symbolic (represent but do not resemble – eg. words or signs), language – the more abstract the wider the class of represented objects (more general) Abstraction triangle: world of nature, world of ideas, world of form

Semiotics Semiotics: signs (stands for something else – stop sign) and symbols (expression of content) Can be cultural Traffic signs: children crossing, traffic lights, no parking, yield, stop Choices for navigation, interfaces

Mapping Mapping information onto the forms, modalities, sounds, colors Examples: virtual tour, driving, visualization, astronomy, games, phobias

Other Representation Issues Budget Real-time rendering Experience level of audience Sensory choices and overload Sensory substitution and reinforcement Representation of the user

Visual Representation Placement on the realism continuum or abstraction triangle (ideas, nature, form) Depth cues Interface Relative importance: color, size, placement How to represent abstract concepts Motion

Aural Representation Time based Realism and immersion Force attention Sensory substitution Sonification Spatialization Communicate new information or reinforce Sounds can be ambient, markers (occurrence of an event), localized Speech

Haptic Representation Trusted by cognitive system (“seeing is believing but touching is knowing”) Local to user Generally realistic (otherwise confusing) Used to investigate the world: explore, touch, determine shape, accomplish tasks (NASA) Sometimes for interface Can be props

Sources Understanding Virtual Reality by Sherman & Craig, Morgan Kaufman, 2003 Computer Graphics and Virtual Environments by Slater et al Sugared Puppy-Dog Tails: Gender and Design by Churchill, Interactions, 2010