Design: Extended Reality Design

Statista predicts that, by 2022, virtual reality (VR) will make more than $80 million a year in headsets alone. Over the past few years, top companies such as Microsoft, HTC, Facebook, and Google have been the primary adopters of VR technology. But now, virtual reality is becoming mainstream, with small and medium companies in multiple industries embracing the technology.

What companies’ adoption of virtual reality means for UX designers is that VR design is transitioning from a rare innovation to a must-have service. Design teams must get up to speed on ideating and executing VR projects. Otherwise, they’ll miss out on a stream of potential projects. In this article, I’ll give you a full overview of how to get started with designing VR experiences, from gaining a theoretical understanding to taking practical steps. Let’s go! Read More

As for many UX professionals, my career so far has centered largely around performing UX research and design for Web and mobile applications. However, for the past year or two, I’ve been increasingly excited by virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications and their potential to positively impact our lives. My excitement stems from reimagining existing use cases in spaces such as education, workplace productivity, and entertainment, as well as from recognizing the potential for VR and AR to introduce entirely new digital experiences that go beyond what we’ve so far envisioned. The capabilities of the technology are quickly getting to where they need to be. The primary question people are asking now is: will the content be there?

Experience designers must rise to the challenge. Of course, transitioning from traditional digital platforms to the wild west of extended reality (XR)—a blanket term that encompasses VR, AR, and mixed reality (MR)—requires some prep work. While I’m by no means claiming to be an expert experience designer for XR quite yet, I want to share my journey as an XR fan-boy. I’ve been absorbing the relatively small amount of information that is currently available on designing VR and AR experiences—reading every article and watching every video—and tinkering first hand with my beloved head-mounted display (HMD). Read More

In my previous two columns in this mini-series about extended reality (XR) design, I discussed some building blocks of XR, as well as some fundamentals to consider when designing an XR experience. Now that I’ve covered some of the broader aspects of this design space, I’d like to shift gears a bit and discuss some specific concepts you should be aware of once you’ve gained some traction in the XR space and want to improve the experiences you’re creating.

In this installment of my mini-series, I’ll cover five additional design concepts:

1. Field of view (FOV) and retention versus exposure in virtual reality (VR)
2. Foveated rendering
3. Multimodal interactions
4. Hologram placement
5. Locomotion and disorientation Read More