UX for XR: From One Designer to Another

recording now all right so as i mentioned i'm so excited to have aletha talking to us today um i've had the honor of working with her and being mentored by her for the last couple of years and i can tell you something that she'd never tell you about herself she is an incredibly talented designer and researcher she is thoughtful in her design empathetic and her approach and forward thinking in her execution alitha has worked in the airline and oil and gas industries she's also been a guest author for sci-fi interfaces and she's a creator at heart whether it's creating new interfaces furniture or a homemade leather-bound journal she has always inspired me to continue learning and creating and so i hope today that she will have that same effect on all of you so with that i'm going to turn it over to alipa to talk to us a little bit about ux4 xr elitha take it away thanks i'm getting ready to share my screen now and are you seeing the desktop yep we can see our screen okay um so like she said i'm elita singleton i'm an immersive tech ux design professional with over 22 years of experience designing for kiosk websites mobile apps desktop software and extended reality for many well-known and not so well-known companies but today i'm not speaking on behalf of or representing a company i'm talking to you as one professional ux designer to another so i'll be sharing my own experiences and learnings as i walk you through my journey transitioning from designing for traditional 2d experiences to rich and immersive three-dimensional experiences in extended reality for as long as i can remember i've always been interested in emerging in future technology it can be fun and exciting to see how ideas that once seemed so impossible only a couple of decades ago are now being prototyped and developed in labs around the world now i would often dream of being a part of that cutting edge innovation and ideation thinking about how technology could improve lives and then of building it and making it real so when i started teaching myself to design for the web in 1997 it was still considered emerging and had just worked started working its way up into the plateau of productivity on the gartner annual hype cycle for emerging technologies report and as the web was climbing its way up into the tech bubble of the early 2000s virtual reality disappeared into the trough of disillusionment since the processing power of the time wasn't quite where it needed to be to support a comfortable vr experience then many years later it suddenly showed back up on the scene with the oculus rift kickstarter campaign and the release of their dk1 package most people at the time saw the re-emergence of the vr fad of the 90s that would soon pass into obscurity once again many still believe this even now sadly i didn't have the money to contribute to the kickstarter campaign but i did see the value and the potential of the modern advances in vr with the oculus prototype and its ability to make you feel like you're somewhere else and at this point i've been in a tech slump feeling like i was stuck designing for the same technology platform i had been since 1997 but this new advancement reignited my emerging tight flame and i quickly realized i didn't want to fall behind again so like with the web in 1997 i began studying emerging and future tech again more seriously in my free time i conducted extensive human centered r d in order to learn or if they didn't exist come up with my own ux best practices for augmented and virtual reality and other emerging texts so that i would be able to transition into the space and more effectively advocate its early adoption and over the years i shared experiments and research with co-workers in order to gain traction word eventually spread and i joined a side project with fellow co-workers who were enthusiastic about proving the value of vr within the enterprise eventually an official team was stood up and i became the first official ux designer in the emerging technology space within that company during that time i worked with an awesome team of people that i'm not able to properly credit they know who they are and i'd like to say they're the best team i've worked with in my 22 plus years on the workforce so each year gartner puts out a report that illustrates the market excitement maturity and benefit of more than 2 000 technologies that have high levels of interest and that gartner believes has the potential for significant impact back in the 2015 hype cycle report gartner had predicted that augmented in virtual realities would take five to ten years to reach the plateau of productivity in 2017 they were still on track for that prediction and then suddenly in 2019 they disappeared from the hype cycle report they had already passed the slope of enlightenment and had made their way into the plateau of productivity gartner states at the end of their report that while ar and vr are still important they've already become integral to business operations and are no longer considered emerging xr which is the umbrella term for augmented mixed in virtual reality is now used in the travel medical military manufacturing retail and film industries just to name a few and since companies have started using these technologies viewers are more immersed into film and ways never before possible trainees and students have gained higher levels of retention situational awareness is increased injuries have been avoided lives have been saved and people have gained empathy for those around them and behaviors have changed for the better this is not just a fad this is not just a game if you're standing still you're already behind everything we already do for web mobile and desktop ux design is still relevant when designing immersive experiences the processes still include discovery ideation prototyping testing building iteration although the goal is basically the same which is to design delightful and compelling experiences that are easy to use the platform is completely different instead of designing for 2d screens with a limited screen size we're designing for another dimension in which 3d spaces in the world around us or the canvas this means we have to shift our mindset to start thinking in 360 degree three-dimensional spaces unlike with 2d experiences where you can control what the user sees when with 3d experiences you have to take into account that the user may look anywhere at any time this is where designing for print or for real space such as installations and exhibits are very relevant skills for creating virtual spatial designs and experiences it's also important to understand movement in virtual space real world objects can move in six different ways in physical space by rotating and moving back and forth and side to side on x y and z planes in virtual space there are two types of freedom of movement available depending on the technology being used it's important to know which technology and platforms you'll be using before you start designing and developing the experience so that you don't have to go back later and make costly changes 3d off or three degrees of freedom is mainly seen in phone based headsets such as the google cardboard vr and oculus go headsets it allows you to look around with your head but you can't move around as you would in the real world if you tried to physically move your body in real space the virtual world would follow you on a gimbal instead of you moving in that virtual world if you want to allow users to move around in this type of world you would need virtual locomotion which causes more of a risk of motion sickness there are methods and workarounds to reduce sickness which will be covered in the moving around locomotion section of my best practices medium blog and sixth off or six degrees of freedom is the type of movement you see in the higher end devices such as the htc vive oculus rift valve index and the more affordable standalone oculus quest you can rotate and move around in virtual space the same as you would in the real world you can walk around peek under objects and interact with them as long as the experience has been created to do so for larger virtual world maps or limited physical space you would have a combination of virtual locomotion and natural movement the virtual locomotion still poses a risk of motion sickness when the real physical speed of the movement doesn't match the virtual speed again there are workarounds to reduce sickness which will be covered in the medium bug as with any other traditional technology different ux rules apply for each of the different types of digital realities available so it's important to be able to distinguish the differences so that you can make better decisions on which to use for any particular project for example training simulations could be created in augmented mixed or virtual reality if it's in augmented or mixed reality the user can walk around freely in that case you would want to provide information that adds insight while ensuring the user's vision of the real world isn't hindered by the interface whereas with virtual reality the user is confined to a limited amount of play space where locomotion is handled in other ways so to help you to make more informed decisions i'll give you a quick rundown of these different types of realities back in 1994 paul milgram and fumio kishino created the reality virtuality continuum in order to roughly illustrate the extension of reality from completely real to completely virtual this is a simplified illustration that doesn't go into all the nuances of the space but it is a good start to help you understand the major differences between the different types of reality and this complete spectrum of realities has been calling extended reality or xr the x can also be used as a variable for whatever comes next and i'll break these down starting with real environment or as the hockey hall of fame refers to it real reality this is the real physical environment that they're used to experiencing but we are now interesting or maybe sadly going to have to start distinguishing from the other types of reality augmented or ar it overlays information onto the real physical world there are many use cases and examples for augmented reality but one example would be this wayfinding app where you're overlaying the subway line directions and information onto the real world based on your physical location mobile ar won't be in this talk or on my medium blog since the interactions are still performed on a mobile device's 2d screen it would be best to refer to the hmi guidelines for those devices if you'd like to learn more about them there are a few products on the market that can easily be confused with augmented reality but more accurately fall into the category of smart glasses these smart glasses allow you to pull up information onto a small 2d screen within a head mounted display as reference thus occluding the world instead of augmenting it while they still have very useful applications they don't overlay digital information onto the real world in 3d space so they don't truly fall within the augmented reality spectrum even though marketers and even companies may place them there the tilt 5 ar glasses targets the tabletop gaming fan base since it can add more drama to your traditional sessions with special effects and 3d world maps you can also play remotely with friends as long as they have a pair of classes they have successfully completed their campaign production and pre-orders of being taken on this reality virtuality diagram there are various levels of augmentation which range from traditional information overlays of augmented reality to environments that intermix the world the real world with life-size digital objects and this range of augmentation is known as mixed reality or mr mixed reality can increase visualization and collaboration with people in the room or with people around the world an example of this is the spatial app which is in the early phases and can be tried for free on vr headsets and on the hololens and as you move further across the mixed reality gradient the levels of the real physical environment versus the digital environment begin to shift and switch to become more of an augmented virtuality where your digital reality is then being augmented with the real world an example of this would be the leap motion which uses objects from the real world such as your hands and creates virtual representations of them so that you can use natural gestures in world oculus has also released the beta version of their hand tracking technology on the quest which works similarly to leap motion however instead of having to attach an external device the quest uses existing inside out tracking they recently released their design guidelines which you can check out on the developer portal and currently there aren't very many examples of augmented virtuality available but as the technology advances you'll start to see more arise or at least it seems to me like it's trending towards being included in the vr category as an extra level of immersion instead of being its own category and finally virtual reality fully transports and immerses you into a completely digital world a great example of this is unreal engine vr mode which makes you feel like you're actually there you can walk around and interact with the characters and objects in that world increasing levels of immersion into these virtual worlds is made possible through creative use of haptic devices and carefully placed physical props those levels of immersion are only going to keep getting more realistic as time goes by so now that you've got a basic rundown of the xr spectrum i want to talk in some more practical terms around transitioning into the space as a designer or a ux practitioner the team still has similar functions to what you would see in an application development environment and it merges that with some of the skills more common in gaming and entertainment project management visual and interface design and ux design and user research prototyping and development motion design should be used for traditional web and mobile technology but it's an absolute must for xr and some of the skills that are more typical in gaming and entertainment include 3d modeling and rendering environment design sound design storyboarding and concept art character design and animation and model rigging so if you already have a background experience in these areas you're much closer than you think and even if you don't have these existing skills don't lose heart any design skill from any background is a huge help architecture interior design industrial design and event booth design require you to design and think spatially in 360. prop design and cad also give you a leg up since you're designing 3d objects and working with complex design tools that can be exported as formats that would go into a 3d modeling workflow and actually the same with the architecture and interior design for that one as well photography experience will give you an advantage for things like field of view depth field lighting camera angles and exposure and print and graphic design is relevant since the things that are designed for print and real space have a correlation with xr spatial design typography sizing and relationships and i'm sure i've missed some but it's possible that you have a good starting point if you come from a similar design background and if you don't you're a clean slate and you can start fresh which should also be nice from a user research perspective it's essentially the same process you're just testing from a different platform however there are some new things that you would need to keep in mind that aren't necessarily issues with 2d experiences and there are some important nuances to usability testing for xr but overall the fundamental principles are the same i don't have anything on this on the blog yet but i will be releasing more information in the future so subscribe if you haven't yet and the biggest change will happen on the content side of things navigational structures information architecture and best practices are going to align more with the game and entertainment design than it will for your traditional websites apps and desktop software menu designs text and body copy have to be treated differently and that's covered in more detail in my medium blog under disability and legibility and the biggest learning curve for designers is going to be the design tools and the software since you're not going to be able to use the traditional wireframing and rapid prototyping tools you would for 2d applications and there are a couple of reasons for that first of all the industry is in the early enough stages that those tools are still being created and secondly you're designing for 3d so you need to think spatially and the tools should enable you to do that there are some plugins that will let you use xd or sketch to create flat echo rectangular images that can be viewed in 360 degrees on the cardboard vr the problem is if you're wanting to design for high-end devices this will only get you to initial ideas if you want to prototype and test and make sure spatial design and placement of ui elements is right you're going to need to get into 3d as soon as possible and that's very important photoshop and similar image creation tools are still being used to create the ui assets that are then imported into unity or unreal but those images will have different resolution sizing quality requirements then you're used to seeing in 2d design because of the scaling needs for immersive 3d and the ui creation workflows in unity and unreal and the quickest way to get started while you're learning new tools is to go back to good old pen and paper much of my design time is spent storyboarding and sketching interactions it's a good way to quickly share your ideas and intentions with your team for rapid feedback and you can also use a technique taken from industrial design in which you create 3d props and prototypes out of basic craft supplies and then you act out the experience for early concept testing this is the technique microsoft used to prototype for the hololens in the early days of development since the headset was still being built it's a good way to design and test for technology that doesn't exist yet another important thing you're going to have to start doing now is playing video games and trying out as many xr experiences as you can get your hands on yes you have permission to start gaming for your career advancement game development has a heavy influence on vr development in particular so understanding how these models behave in certain situations and what interactions are easy or hard to figure out game mechanics and much more will give you a greater understanding of how to design quality immersive experiences and if you have the energy and you want to start creating your own pattern library of interactions and designs that you think are great examples that you can draw on for inspiration in your own projects i use video clips a lot to communicate intentions with developers and other team members it really hits home how awesome the space is when you can legitimately include reference to vader and marvel or the wizards in your statement of work if you don't have the energy to do this yourself good news i've been creating my own pattern library for a while and we'll be making it available in the next few months stay tuned by following me on medium and linkedin to know when it gets when it gets launched another quick way to get into this space while you're learning the more advanced tools is to check out tools like sketchbox and marquette which allow you to storyboard in vr both of these will allow you to combine multiple static scenes into sequence that you can play through to communicate design intent and rapid prototype experiences and concepts and you can also use animation tools such as quill and tavori to handle everything from storyboarding to puppeteering to creating fully immersive film these tools are moderately priced and only work on vr headsets that will run from the pc they also have a little bit more of a learning curve than maquette in sketchbots and at some point you are going to have to get a basic understanding of how the game engines work that are used to create these xr experiences even if you don't want to learn how to code in unity and the more you understand about how they work the better since they require very different way of thinking than with traditional web or app design and this is especially important if you're looking to join an existing xr dev team most of them want you to be able to at least place the ui elements you design in traditional software into the engine yourself since this take some of the burden off the developers and it'll allow you to create somewhat functional prototypes for testing and if you don't know how to code that's okay as long as you can wrap your head around the way coders approach development this is because unity and unreal both have visual scripting methods available that allow you to connect nodes together so that you can create applications without without having to go into too much depth into the coding side of things so a quick rundown of the software to check out definitely check out the game engines unity 3d is used heavily for gaming due to its robust cross-platform capabilities and unreal is just released a major update it's used for more cinematic features modeling software such as blender which is free substance maya or cinema 4d and sketchbox 3d or microsoft marquette if you want to design a storyboard in vr they're both free and allow you to import and export assets sketchbox has the added benefit of being multiplayer and maquette has a mode that lets you preview how things would look in the hololens if you want to prototype for ar or mr and quill and tavore are moderately priced robust animation tools that are used for creating in vr image creation tools like photoshop can be used to create textures materials and ui elements adobe xd or sketch can also be used to create ui elements but again the specs and the quality are going to be different than you're used to with 2d apps and websites adobe medium lets you create texturize and paint 3d models in vr but since adobe only recently acquired the app from oculus it's currently only available on the oculus platform so you'll need a pc based oculus rift or a quest with the oculus link cable to use it for now and for creating storyboard sketches and concept art the autodesk sketchbook app and storyboarder are both free photoshop can also be used and if you you will also need a simple video editing tool such as imovie or adobe premiere rush that will let you quickly grab and slice video clips in the design process is going to vary by company for the most part you can expect it to follow the game design and development process since all the same tools and skills are needed for both if you would like to overview of how google's design process works they published a few talks during their conference in 2016 2015 that you would find very useful and i'm including the links to those videos at the end of this talk unless elaine is already posting them in chat and we don't have time to go through all the ux best practices that i've written so far but i do want to give you a quick overview of some of the foundational things to keep in mind studios our studies show that if a user has a bad experience with new technology they're more likely to consider all experiences within that category to be a bad experience and are likely to adopt it or to give it another chance in the future even when those subsequent experiences are higher quality and that's why i say that it's imperative to the longer term success of the new technology that the user experience be well thought out and well executed motion sickness is one of the most common negative side effects of vr experiences this can include feeling seasickness headaches general nausea dizziness vertigo or even in some cases vomiting this happens when there's a mismatch between what's being seen and what's being felt or in other words you're i see that you're moving but your body doesn't feel any motion and many people in the vr dev community laugh at this and don't think it's a big deal especially if they're the ones fortunate enough not to get motion sickness however it's very important to take it very seriously and ensure that the experiences we create have precautions in place to reduce the possibility or the risk of sickness and i've seen way too many examples of people trying a vr experience getting sick and never wanting to put headset back on again and personally i've gotten sick from vr experiences that ruined my entire evening and now i refuse to ever play those games again and every time i think about one of them the first thing i remember is feeling sick and i warn my friends away from even buying those games and that's the last thing you want so if you want a better return on investment for your experiences take motion sickness seriously explore ways to cause objects to move while keeping the horizon steady and the user grounded if you don't have a grounded point of reference the reaction similar to how people are more likely to get seasick when they're further out to sea and can't see land you get a little better when you go out on deck and stare out at the stable horizon but not as much as when there's land in sight and if a very large virtual object is moving the user can get disoriented and think they're moving much like a car sitting in a railroad crossing after a certain amount of time the driver feels like they're the one moving sideways instead of the train you can avoid this by placing smaller fixed objects within the space like the railroad crossing signs and arms and the foundation supporting them let the user initiate the control of movement start with slow and smooth motion and gradually increase the seat steadily this is similar to how a driver has less chance of becoming car sick than a passenger since the driver is able to anticipate what's about to happen it's also very important that the experience maintain head tracking and if you're seeing weirdness going on right now that's on purpose especially for vr even a short pause in head tracking can cause illness much like what you would get with vertigo when the environment freezes even though you're moving your head test the application closely for an intentional unintentional latency or freezes in performance with the human eye your lens shapes itself to focus on different objects while the rest of the world blurs this helps your eyes focus on the targeted object while reducing eye strain as you get older the lens hardens and makes it more difficult to quickly focus on objects that are too near or too far when this happens if something's too close to read it's going to hurt your eyes that's why you see as people age they have to start holding things out further too comfortably the current lenses in xr headsets are fixed focus kind of like the aged eye only instead of taking a longer amount of time to shift focus it's unable to shift the focus at all and this causes eye strain as our actual eyes are working harder to try to shift focus on objects in digital space one of the first things people say when i mention needing glasses to see in a headset is that i can just wear contacts people who wear contact lenses should be fine and that would be an ideal solution however keep in mind that not everyone is able to wear contact lenses for various reasons custom prescription lenses are available but they're costly for the individual and impractical for shared devices remember that those of us who need these prescription lenses also have to pay for our everyday glasses and depending on the medical condition many people need prescriptions updated more frequently than once a year it's not sustainable to have to buy new prescription lenses for each xr headset in addition to everyday glasses that company such as cereal are working on ways to simulate real world depth of field in real time by tracking your eyes and visually focusing on that area or object much like the human eye would naturally behave this will reduce the risk of eye strain and the digital vision correction it offers will also increase the scalability and affordability of xri wear since it would reduce the need for custom prescription lenses in each headset the technology is still in that works and it's not available on the market yet so what do we do in the meantime i would recommend that you evaluate the hardware to ensure a person can wear their own eyeglasses comfortably within the headset and also ensure that the hardware doesn't cause a risk of damage to the eyeglasses while wearing putting on or taking off the headset one example of one that does not support eyeglasses at all is the magic leaf they have no room for glasses and watch closely for signs of eye training or headaches within your group they will often say it's fine when they're actually just trying not to inconvenience others in order to avoid eye strain and headaches it's important to pay attention to the placement of the text elements in virtual 3d space font size depth contrast spacing density lighting and many other things can affect the legibility of text and ui elements try to keep text at an optimal viewing distance of two to three meters from the user one to two meters is the minimum recommended distance for text content but that can still cause eye strain and again as the technology improves and we're able to simulate depth of field better in the future this will change so you'll also want to keep blocks of text short and simple follow the real world poster and signage examples when determining text sizes weights and plate and spacing and there's so much more that i could cover but we don't have time to go through all of it tonight and i've created a list of links to reference the information i've mentioned tonight and that should be posted in the chat soon if it hasn't already been and you can read all of the best practices i've published so far on my medium blog articles are added regularly and i have them categorized and broken down for quick reference by topic and each article includes a tldr list of do's and don'ts and links to resources to learn more and be sure to follow me on linkedin medium patreon and twitter so you can stay up to date on the more in-depth content and resources i'll be adding in the future and that's all i have for tonight i'll turn it back to elena for questions awesome thank you so much alitha that was incredible um i've read some of your work before and your best practices but that was really awesome to really see how it's progressed in your life as well um so that was exciting thank you so much for sharing with us um i do have a couple questions to get us started we are gonna have time here for q a um so i thought i would just get started with a couple questions off the bat the first one i wanted to ask you was you mentioned that there are some nuances with research and so i was hoping you could go into a little bit more detail about your experience with the difference in ux research for for vr and for xris overall yeah um so what you're used to seeing is two people sitting at a table one in front of a computer and one moderating the experience and then some other people are sitting in a room maybe observing but um with xr it's going to be different um and when you're observing the people you have to be strict in your ground rules for what's going on so you're going to have to limit the people in the room and it's a little bit more difficult since um vr is so interesting to everyone everyone wants to watch um and it's a little bit more difficult you can do it yes but it's a little bit more difficult to do remote vr testing so everybody's going to want to sit in the room so you really have to set your limitations on who can be in the room and you have to take not talking during testing very seriously whereas if you're observing from another room you can talk to each other quietly and make comments but if you're in a room observing for especially vr because they can't see you all they can see is what's in the world any noise outside of that can be disconcerting and you also want to have a safety spotter for vr which is something you don't need for a computer um because they can't see what's around them you want to make sure that especially depending on the simulation that you're trying out if it's something where somebody jumps or climbs or falls you have to be really careful um to make sure that they don't try to do that physically um because that can end bad so you have to have a safety spotter and to make sure they don't run into walls or anything because they can't see and you're also going to be using notes uh paper notes instead of typing notes because they can hear the typing that if they're in that headset then they can um they're going to hear that typing and that's going to be disconcerting as well and you are new supplies that you didn't think about with computers hopefully you've never needed for computers as bomb bags because depending on the potential motion sickness of this simulation that will be needed you just want to keep them out of the view of the user so they don't think about it um and cold water in case they need it um and something that's different with the than what you're used to with the computer is you don't have to show people how to use a mouse anymore or a keyboard anymore but with the vr headset or any of the new xr headsets you're gonna have to show them this is the headset this is this is where the buttons are if you need to adjust something this is the controller this is how you hold it these are all the buttons this is what they do because that's not because it's a new technology and they're not used to it so with the computer you wouldn't want to tell somebody up front how to use something but again it's not the mouse that you're testing them on it's the software so you have to show them how to use the hardware before they get in because especially with vr if you put on the headset you can't see the controllers anymore unless they are simulated in the world so they can't see the buttons by memory and it takes a while to memorize the button placement so you'll want to show them get them comfortable with it ahead of time if you've never been in vr before and then simulate that's one of the best practices that's not in here yet is um simulate the controller in world 2 so that they can see it since they're not used to this technology yet and make sure that supervisors are not there of course and that fans of vr are not observers in the room they have to not come in that's that's a problem audiences i have a couple of follow-ups i think my first one is uh you mentioned the whole concept of a vomit bag have you ever had to use the vomit bag or have your participants had to use a vomit bag for testing almost um that we have had somebody have to get out of the headset rather quickly and it's um some people have different issues going on with their ears and that and so um that inner ear issue can cause vertigo and sickness at the most sensitive levels so even just getting in there if there is the slightest of jittering that's why it's important for performance is even with the slightest amount of jittering in there it can cause some people to get sick so yes it's important my other follow-up to that was we do tell them before they get in the headset if you feel uncomfortable at all don't push through it take off the headset that sounds like good advice you tell them to turn to close their eyes before they take the headset off though yeah that would be good that made a big difference when i went through it and the cold water was definitely helpful yeah yeah um one other follow-up question i had to just the whole concept of usability testing with with xr i guess specifically vr um you mentioned the learnability of it so i was wondering how do you maybe account for that in your metrics and like the your results i guess of a usability test um you would just so you do screening up front um so you know whether or not the person is experienced in vr um that's another thing that's different is your screening so like you saw the polls at the beginning of this talk about gaming experience and xr experience and there's a proven um there's a proven difference in what i've seen so far and people with gaming experience have an easier time picking it up than people that have no gaming experience on consoles specifically um that of course i've only tested i haven't tested a whole ton of people but that's what i'm seeing so it's using your judgment and also remembering that you're not testing them on the on the controller you're testing them on how to use the experience and one of the things that you would be testing is how good of an onboarding experience do you have and even even though you're showing them the controllers in world they forget as soon as they put the headset on so it doesn't really make a ton of difference but it does help to show them beforehand and i had that's where i've had an onboarding experience and they still had trouble if they're brand new to vr remembering what the controllers are so that's that then told me that i needed to create a better way of reminding them in world what those controllers are without sticking a thing to the hud like they do in video games great thank you i do have some more questions but i wanted to open it up and see anyone if you want to go ahead and unmute yourself feel free to take the floor and ask elita any questions you might have i'll take it off i guess since it's empty um i have like a little cardboard are there some fun exercises or some like tried and true ways so just kind of start experimenting with like an ar design or a ui i know you mentioned xd there's a plug-in are there some exercises maybe that you could throw out to the group to kind of try on their own um if you do a search on youtube there are tons of little um tutorials on how to create cardboard games and stuff that's what i did at first and that was in unity so that actually taught me the basics of unity too so and you can create those for cardboard unity is better for cardboard than unreal from my experience i don't know about lately recently but um in my experience unity is better for that but xd i'm not sure if it works for ar it does work for vr no i um i've been wanting to learn unity someone on my team is they built something for the web with it or they're doing an experiment for it um so it seemed like an interesting tool to try or a little bit easier to implement on the web versus like a cinema 4d yeah i i did if you just look for are you ar kit or android i'm an android so there should be tons of ar kit i mean android um tutorials on how to create for ar on there on youtube i found tons so well yeah youtube is the answer um for this okay awesome um i'll look up some tutorials um and unity is that like what you're cert what i need to search like uh unity cardboard tutorials for android i'm trying to figure out what i should search yeah um that that would probably work and then also adobe is has come out with this software called arrow yeah you can also look into yes one question i had for you um what are your thoughts on that product because i i kind of tested it out on my mobile and i was considering working on a few projects but but do you see a future [Music] yeah well it depends you know like with pokemon go if you played it you saw a lot of people driving on the road looking at their phones trying to play a game instead of watching the road and you see a lot of people holding their hands up for long periods of time so i don't see a problem with it as long as there's a good use for it um so yes it can be useful but it has to be in very small chunks because you are holding up the thing and that's going to make your arms tired whereas with ar glasses it's going to just be on your face and you're not going to have to worry about it so there's that to think about if you are going to sign for mobile ar then make sure your interactions are short so they don't have to hold the phone up for long periods of time and that they're not distracted from what's going on around them thank you thanks for those questions any other questions out there so one question um i was thinking about as you're presenting you started going into the different aspects of how to get into xr and and how to start thinking about it from a design perspective um one thing you talked about was starting to think spatially i was just wondering how do you go about doing that yeah that one is um so i have the weird experience of when i was a child i looked at floor plans for funsies and imagined that i was in those spaces so i have a little bit of uh um a strange advantage there thinking spatially but um one of the things that you can do is just start looking around in your actual world and seeing where objects are placed be aware of your surroundings and where objects are placed and look at event booth design and exhibit design and see how are they drawing your attention to these areas that you're wanting them to look at and how are they um getting you to look away from the um the boring things to grab your attention to look at these things and it's best to just get into a head 3d headset as soon as possible try vr games as much as possible as you can get your hands on even the cardboard ones if as i started out on the cardboard i didn't have a headset um and start trying to experiment with if you can get access to tilt brush on the quest or to a vr headset that you can use with a pc then you can try tilt brush on the quest or on the pc and then you can try sketchbox and maquette to start just placing things and you'll you'll get more of a spatial sense of things as you as you spend more time in that space thanks i love that i think they're coming up with some really good um like exhibit designs recently like art based designs too that is really interesting to start thinking about them in this perspective all right so i think courtney had a question so courtney did you want to ask your question yeah hi alithia thanks again for this talk it's been really interesting i was curious um this is more of a practical question but um you know in the development of xr projects what to you are the most valuable interlocks or relationships essential to developing an effective xr project from the ux side of things um start there but i wouldn't necessarily limit it to that i have a marketing background so i also deal with the business side so i'm curious like holistically when it comes to that kind of a project development but definitely start with the ux given the audience well they well my opinion is the ux is the most important thing because um yeah studies do show that if you have a bad experience and i've met people myself who have put on a headset and if they had a bad experience if they got sick they never wanted to put it on again um so that's one of the from a marketing standpoint one of the successful things that works is getting them in the headset because one of the things they have the most trouble with is even being convinced that there's any value in vr at all they think it's a game they think it's fun that it's not really for enterprise use or for business use it's for it's for gamers so getting those people in a headset and showing them an experience that is good and it doesn't have to be one that you built it could just be walk the plank uh the plant challenge if you haven't done that it's a very good one to convince people of um the value of vr specifically of how it puts you in another world um get them in the headset and that's how they'll see there's quality but it has to be a good experience that you're putting them in that's the most important thing and then from there they'll start picking it up and advocating themselves and from the ux side motion sickness making sure physically that the headset isn't hurting them because it can get very uncomfortable very quickly especially if you any of you have an innocuous quest they are very heavy and they'll put a lot of weight on your head and and on your face and it gets tiring very quickly so making sure that you're using good headsets that are comfortable and making sure that you're reducing the chances of motion sickness and designing experiences that are easy to use how you do that [Music] is a process but does that answer your question at all yeah it does and we had another question in the chat from melanie um she wanted to know whether people whether ux people in xr can easily move between the different technologies or if you feel like they need to specialize in one way i think you could move between them um the only reason i don't talk that much about the ar headsets right now is because they're not really available to the public yet the hollow lens is very expensive and it's mostly enterprise and medical that is using it right now so i haven't really had much of a chance to work with it yet but it once you get access if you have access to it then i don't think that there's much of a difference in moving between them it's just that you would if you do usability testing the way you test will be a little bit different because with any ar you're going to want to test in the field if at all possible however if you can't get into the field a good way of working around that would be to simulate it in vr but um other than that you're gonna need to know the best you're gonna need to know the hmi guidelines for the headset because there's no standard right now so the only thing is just learning the hmi guidelines what works and doesn't work for each of the headsets and then you should be okay switching between them a lot of the games are made cross-platform anyway so there shouldn't be an issue awesome melanie did that answer your question i know you've got some background noise you're trying to avoid but feel free to add in the chat if you wanted to elaborate on that at all okay awesome anybody else have any other questions for alisa i've got one more of my own all right so the last question i had for you lisa was um do you have any special considerations or recommendations for adding this type of work to your portfolio if this is something that you're interested in you know showing off how would you go about letting an employer know that you've started to gain this experience so it's going to be different than your my mind just went blank the um dribble dribble it's going to be different than your dribble account you are going to want to prototype and experiment and then you just share your journey of learning and a lot of people the way they're getting into the field and getting their names out there is by blogging about their journey or sharing their prototype videos of their prototypes on linkedin on youtube and um writing about what they're learning as they learn it that's hack that's actually how i one of the ways i started learning like i was saying i searched youtube for a lot of tutorials but then there were also a lot of articles that i found on medium that talked about people as people would blog about their journey and what they learned as they went and that's where i learned a lot so sharing your experiences experiments sketches if you've got any sketches of concepts that you can share write about your journey and then you might also consider prototypes with webvr or web ar if you're wanting to do aor looks like we've got another uh question in the chat um what do you think are the biggest challenges to mainstream acceptance of xr technologies great question melanie pricing and um so pricing and you have to have a gaming pc for most of them right now and gaming pcs are expensive so that the quest has made huge inroads into that it's made a huge difference in the entire industry um but even those are a little pricey but they're much less expensive than having to buy a headset having to hook up all of this tracking software in your house and setting up a space in your room so um yeah pricing is the biggest thing right now for the ar and mr side of things it's pricing and it's also there's more of an issue with eyeglasses for that than there is for vr because most of your headsets will let you put your glasses on underneath them but with mr and ar they're trying to make it your eyeglasses and so then of course they're saying just buy prescription lenses and put them in there but if you have eyeglasses i have two pairs of eyeglasses and they ones for computers consistent computers all day and once my just everyday glasses for distance because i'm older i have to have multiple prescriptions and that is not that is not sustainable for ar i couldn't afford to buy both my normal pairs of glasses plus the prescription lenses plus the ar glasses themselves and hope before i even get the prescription because you have to order it i hope that the ar headset works and that i actually like it because by the time i get the prescription lenses for it and i can actually see what's in the headset then i've spent all this on these prescription lenses and i don't even like the headset so that's my that's my anyway that's totally fair and i'm 100 comment about oculus quest it was a really amazing purchase because it's so simple it's and it's about the cost of like buying a new video game console i would say so if you're like in the market for a new video game console it's like this is just the newest type of video game console from my perspective so i highly recommend the good news about the good news about the quest is that you can actually use your mac to develop for the quest on you can do it on a mac you don't have to have a gaming pc for that so that's good news awesome um melanie also wanted to know if you had any funny examples of xr fails like her colleague who put a hole in their game room playing on a headset well i have so you see these shogu screens behind me i have a hole in one over there um i got annoyed with an interface and there was this tablet that was floating around in my face and i couldn't get it to leave me alone so i threw it and i put my hand through my shoulder screen that's a fail that's hilarious and i've had people fall on their rears playing beat saber yeah that makes sense so is there an affordable oculus option that you know we can actually like for those of us that are curious about it but maybe you know wondering how deep to invest into it just to get things started the question i think that what's the new and the lowest model of the new one is 299. i don't know if they still have the go available the go is not a six a six off though it's a three dollar so it's kind of like a cardboard only a little bit more advanced so even if you want to just get into it i started with the cardboard and i think it's advanced enough now that it might actually be better than what it was when i was trying it out if you just want to try out developing and learning unity and testing out things there are a ton of free videos like invasion from baobab studios is a really good little short film that's available on the cardboard that you can that you can watch and pay attention to how the characters act and pay attention to how to get you to look where they want you to look um to start learning about space oculus is the oculus go still available i don't even know i have to look thank you from their website let the oculus go it doesn't look like it's just the but that could be wrong i'm just looking directly on the oculus website yeah hey i have never owned a um gaming system what would be a good one to try out if that's something that you may need to uh experiment with so are you talking about a pc i don't know like uh you mentioned earlier in your talk that um playing games kind of helps um give you some more perspective so is that a handheld gaming system or a computer game that um maybe we should check out well they they would both work i have that's actually reminds me of my next step after cardboard was to get the psvr so i got ps4 um for gaming and then the psvr headset's actually the most comfortable headset on the market even though it doesn't get a lot of love it's actually the most comfortable one there is um the only problem is that you it's it's you can't do 360p saver on the oculus on the psvr gotcha it's just the one game that's the problem but so what i did and that was because i didn't want to spend all that money on an expensive pc and i i still wanted to learn gaming so i went with the psvr because it the ps4 and the psvr but the fives out now i think um and it still works with the psvr if you want to try that um because then you get both you get your gaming and your yeah that's very cool um i'll have to check that out holidays are coming up folks good black friday purchase yeah maybe we have black friday deal for us but if you there is this thing i think switch tried doing a vr headset but it's it's a joke um just don't and um but the i have a ps vita i have the switch light and then i have the ps4 with the psvr um they they'll all work but you'll just get more benefit from the tsvr thank you everyone for the questions were there any other final questions for alipa all right i wanted to i know some people have kind of come in and out a little bit throughout the talk so i just wanted one more time to put all of the resources that she's provided in the chat again um so that you have them and then um one other thing that i can recommend at this point for folks if you want all those links you can right click at the bottom of the typing window in the chat and you can save the chat if you want to keep those links for yourself for later um you can even do that at the end we'll probably have a couple more links to show here in a second but alitha thank you so much for sharing your journey with with all of the different aspects of virtuality i kind of loved that word that whole spectrum is really cool to see um and just how as ux professionals we can start getting involved with this no longer emerging technology um even though i think it is to a lot of us still um so i just really appreciate all of your insights and i strongly encourage you all to follow her um she puts a lot of really great resources on her uh her medium blog so that you can follow her and subscribe as she said so you can stay up with all of the latest in ux for xr so before we close out i've got just a couple more announcements um for us but with some upcoming events for hexagon um so i'm going to go ahead and share my screen again all right so i just wanted to um highlight a couple of upcoming events that we have we have one more event for hexagon this month and it is let's talk about money and we've got evelina talking from chai one and she's going to you can come and learn about salary standards in the ux market right now um but more importantly you can also understand how to negotiate both at the start of your career and for raises as you advance through your career so we're really excited to have evelina come and talk with us about that in just a couple weeks on november 17th and then kind of a reminiscent picture from last year we had our holiday party an ugly christmas sweater party in person and we decided we will be doing a virtual holiday party this year more details to come on that but you can save the date for thursday december 3rd and we hope to see you all in festive spirit but like i said more details to come on that um so the next announcements just a couple other opportunities that are coming up um i think meredith mentioned this in the last event we are looking to expand our hexagon ux houston team of co-leads and so we'll be looking to expand that team to continue scaling this organization and we'll be opening up applications in the near future for that so keep an eye on our slack and our meetups for more information on that by the end of the year and early into next year and then we've also started another activity called ux skills flex and we started this in october and we hope for it to be a monthly recurring event where members of the community will volunteer to share one ux skill with the rest of the hexagon community here in houston and the only requirement is pick a ux topic to be able to speak on for about 15 to 20 minutes and then we'll just do kind of q a and discussion after that so we're hoping to officially kick this off in january with a member led event so if you would like to participate in that we really encourage you to sign up you can sign up with you can click on that qr code or i'm also going to put a link in the chat if you want to sign up and there's actually more details in that form so feel free to check out that form let's see that was my last announcement i think the very last thing i had is just one more link um we love to hear how your experience was with our events and so we've just got a little survey for you to take it's just a couple of questions um we want to make sure that we're providing content that you find valuable so we'd love to hear from you through this survey and see if there's anything else we can do to improve other topics you'd like to hear about in these types of formats things you liked things you didn't like any feedback would be awesome to hear from y'all so with that that is all i have for today um alitha again thank you so much for speaking with us it was a pleasure um and i'll give you guys some some time back to your evening thank you thanks y'all have a good evening you

Channel: Hexagon UX Houston

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Id: KIvdK6wrI8k

Length: 69min 22sec (4162 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020