The Oculus Rift and User Experience

The demo provided an interesting experience. I enjoyed the sense of immersion, and while at no point did I feel the need to grab the seat, there was an almost visceral sensation from my brain, telling me that This is not right. There’s something wrong here. The ability to look around using my head as a controller is incredibly powerful. While I usually dislike using the term intuitive in relation to user experience, it’s clear that being able to look around so naturally, without using any controls, is intuitive.

As a piece of technology that delivers a user experience, the Oculus Rift has a huge amount of potential to affect users at a deep emotional level. It has a much greater ability to trick the brain into feeling that something is real. (I use the word feeling rather than thinking because the experience largely bypasses conscious thought.) While some UX professionals have talked about Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET) techniques, here is a technology that can really trigger emotional responses. Much of the ability of the Oculus Rift to deliver on this promise comes from removing an interface layer between the user and the experience.

Focusing on a particular element of the virtual world is a simple matter of the user’s turning his head. While this is just a small thing in itself, the VR approach also removes the need to have separate controls for looking at things, and it filters out the distractions of the real world. It would be interesting to understand how much of an impact this latter capability could have on people’s ability to concentrate when working in a virtual environment, in comparison to a conventional, screen-based approach to computing.

The potential for virtual reality is much broader than just games. Although, if you swap the term games with simulations, a host of applications opens up. The somewhat predictable first-person shooter genre becomes much more like a military simulation when it becomes immersive, with a genuine sense of fear affecting a person’s responses. VR has potential uses in therapy, too. People recovering from severe burns have been able to reduce their pain medication by experiencing simulated icy environments in VR, tricking the brain into feeling the cold. It might also be possible to treat phobias. The sense of immersion and the gut reactions that people feel inside a VR environment could induce phobic reactions to the sources of people’s fears with greater safety than in a situation where the exposure was genuine. By combining VR with a Kinect-like motion-tracking system, athletes could improve their performance in sports—both physical performance and their ability to cope with mental pressure.

The Oculus Rift presents UX challenges as well as opportunities. People must be able to interact with a computer while wearing the headset, without their being able to see the device they’re using to interact. So they can probably use gamepads, mouse devices, and a limited number of keystrokes—assuming users can feel where their fingers are on the keyboard—but a lot of controls would not be workable.

When designing a visual interface, we must keep in mind that people are much more susceptible to motion sickness when wearing a VR headset than when looking at a computer screen. The basic premise of the game Mirror’s Edge was that a gamer was running free through a city, jumping between buildings. It was necessary to tone down the realism of movement in early versions of the game to prevent players from feeling ill. However, people do acclimatize to VR headsets. Regular exposure enables the brain to ignore a lot of the effects. Nevertheless, what developers and designers need to consider encompasses not only what the system presents to the user visually, but how the user’s brain interprets that information. Because a VR experience is much more visceral than a regular experience with a user interface, it presents unique challenges.