Future of VR

With the interaction I have had with the Oculus Rift and the Samsung gear as well as the release of Steam’s Vive a few days ago I decided to switch it up a bit. For a long time people have looked at these devices and said “bah this is a gimmick, this won’t last”. Well, must like the motion controls of the Wii and Kinect and 3D movies in the cinema, VR is here to stay, whether it will do well financially is up for debate but it will defiantly stick around. To look at this we would have to look at the history of VR gaming.

When we look back on VR, the forefather was the Sega Master System, released across the world across the late 80s, which featured 3D glasses for gaming, this was the first step into VR in gaming and while it didn’t do as well commercially as Sega had hoped it was not a failure. 3D gaming then disappeared until the mid 90s when VR became big in the arcades, sure we had racing games where the car would move like you were driving it, or star wars pod racing games where you have actual pod racing controls from the movies, but I’m talking about real VR Games, you see the most successful games in the arcades were either AR and VR, Virtuality dominated the arcade market in Europe for years because of its innovation in VR and Operation Blockade was the first fully 3D, immersive VR game in the arcades, simulating you in a defensive outpost where needed to defend the supply line. At the same time these games were taking off, Nintendo released the Virtual Boy, while it was considered a failure at the time it helped pave the way for 3D Gaming to come out later in the form of the 3DS by Nintendo in 2011. Until now though, VR has seemed to disappear with the death of arcades, which is why I think that Oculus and other VR peripherals will be here to stay. When inspecting these devices you can see they have learned from mistakes from the past. VR has hit a point where, unlike previous iterations, the graphics and hardware can keep up with the device. In the past VR failed because it either made people sick using it or people did not feel immersed because of poor graphics but no more, we have reached a point where neither of those things are that much of a problem and therefore, while VR can fail commercially for quite some time, the VR experience is here to stay as long as games for it exist.

The Muse

Working with the muse has been an interesting experience, I have never before worked with a brainwave headset and dealing with it has been a frustrating experience. Let’s start from the beginning.

With my team we decided to work on a project we called Fashion Passion, Wear your Heart of Your Sleeve. This project was designed to take the brainwaves we can read off the Muse headset and interpret emotions from them. Of course things didn’t go as planned, the muse itself only reads in the Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta and Gamma brainwaves as well as mellow and concentration, this means that it cannot read in emotions by itself. It means that as a group we had to do a lot of experimentation with which brainwaves triggered which emotions.

                The most difficult thing to deal with though with the must was the complete lack of documentation that has been built with it. The developers of the muse created it as hardware and then put it out on the market making it free to develop for but there is no information on how to develop it. The muse seems to have been built in a way that one can only develop it if they already understand what brainwaves do what, how to read data off the muse and how to convert their custom format to be workable in code. This would not be a big problem if there was a community to develop for it but the muse development community is non-existent and therefore nobody knows how to work around issues that occur. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I have had working with a hardware device. 2/10 would not suggest developing for unless they release actual documentation on how to work with it properly.

Prototypes

Basics

Prototypes are the basic starting point of any product. It can range anywhere from a sketch to a physical paper model to a near done project. The idea exists in order to give people, specifically, stakeholders the ability to hold and interact with the project.

Most products start at a low fidelity prototype, sketching out the idea of what you want to do. You can prototype the flow, layout, physical design and even the content of the project in order to contribute to communication and testing during the design stage.

The most important point about prototypes is to iterate quickly. Don’t bother debating and deciding when working in low fidelity, make a prototype, test it and revise it. Sometimes thinking about what to put on over a long period of time will slow you down. As long as you understand your requirements and you can continue iteration and develop your technical and commercial viability.

Low Fidelity vs High Fidelity

At some point you will switch from Low Fi to Hi Fi. High Fidelity prototypes are closer to the finished project, and are generally the current state of the project at that point. Hi Fi prototypes have functionality built into them, physical forms and high amount of details but it also gives the impression that the product is done.

Low Fidelity Prototype Example

Paper Prototype

High Fidelity Prototype Example

Game Prototype

Design Principles

Design Principles

Design Principles are general abstractions of different elements of design. In short they are descriptions of different ways to design interaction. They are: Affordances, Consistency, Constraints, Feedback, Mapping and Visibility.

Affordance

The affordance of an object is the attribute that allows people to understand how to use it, for example.

What do you feel when you see a button. A feeling that you should push it. This is because the design of the button gives it that attribute. While software and other digital interfaces are virtual and thus do not have a physical form, you can still use affordance to help show actions and effects in a virtual world

Consistency

Consistency is creating interfaces that have similar graphics and operations for similar tasks.

Do this:

Not:

Consistent Interfaces are easier to use. If a interface is not consistent it can cause frustration because of unexpected behaviour

Constraints

Constraints should be put into practice to limit the options a user has, allowing them to only do actions that are appropriate or can be processed, stopping them from doing impossible tasks.

An example of this:

Twitter Greys out the ability to Tweet until you fill in the box as a constraint.

Feedback

Feedback is sending back information to the user about system changes and states to the users. The user needs to know if what they did affects anything. Feedback can be physical, visual and audio.

It ranges from when the environment changes when you push a button in game, to when the controller you are holding vibrates when you take damage to when you hear the game play music when you obtain an item.

Mapping

Mapping is placing logical relationship between controls where they are and their real life counterparts. A good goal is to map together controls that do similar actions together, sometimes even on the same dial

Visibility

Here is an object. How does it work, what does it do when I use it, what do i see?

Visibility is very similar to affordance but it operates on a physical level, instead of including all sensed.

An Introduction

What is HCI?

HCI is the interaction of people and computer-based systems. It can be as abstract as how daily interaction with a computer is used to the specifics of a person interacting with a digital coke machine. It is widely studied by multiple corporations and institutions across the world. HCI is concerned with the physical, psychological and theoretical aspects of computer-based systems and how people interact with them.

Why is HCI Important?

HCI is more important today than it was 10 years ago and will be more important 10 years from now. This is because, on some level, almost all people will have to interact with a computer based system, either recreationally or for work. As of such it becomes more and more important for computer-based systems to be more user friendly. While people may argue that computers are extremely complex and the demand for computer and computer based services outweigh the need for usability, it cannot be argued that when people look into getting a computer or working with one, usability it invariably one of the first things they look into.

HCI is also important because it saves money. A majority of projects go over budget because of changes, overlooked tasks, poor analysis, and lack of understanding. Through HCI we can discover what people are looking for easier, work towards understanding users and what they want, help the users understand and explain what they want, pinpoint small tasks that would go unnoticed and introduce a significant amount of analysis and communication into the process.

What is Interactive Design?

Interactive design is the process of designing products and services for the user in the user’s space to help assist with interaction and communication. One of the most famous of these is the computer mouse, a tool developed back in 1963 by Douglas Engelbart in order to assist those using computers to make the experience more interactive.

Today with the advent of the internet, products and services need to be more interactive to catch people attention. In 1945 Hypertext was originally prototyped. This service allowed people to use digital mediums in a more interactive fashion clicking on words or phrases in order to get to more information

Good and Bad Design

There are multiple examples of good and bad design design out there. Here are a couple:

Good:

- Following the conventions for twist lids on a new product, left is loose while right is tight

- Disallowing players to take actions that are impossible, like trying to paste test when you have  

none on the clipboard

Bad:

- Not including the option to undo actions

- Giving no feedback to a player when their character is attacked

-