Hello. I'd like to introduce Dr. Harry Brenton,
who is director of BespokeVR and an immersive user experience designer.
So Harry, the first question is,
what is immersive user experience design?
Well, Marco, on a basic level,
there are things like how you navigate around a VR environment,
how you display information using a heads-up displays,
whether you use an overlay,
whether you have information within the world.
And one of the main concerns certainly initially when
the Oculus Development Kit came out was not making
people feel sick because if people feel sick,
then you're not going to be able to progress further than just the feeling of discomfort.
So that's the foundation of what I'd say immersive user experience is.
But there's a whole load of really interesting stuff which is just emerging about.
I think you're quite familiar
previously in the course about the idea of VR as an illusion,
and to my mind,
a lot of immersive user experience design is understanding what
these illusions are and how as a designer you can strengthen them.
And what do you think the biggest thing that is different for UX,
for VR as opposed to other media?
One of the main things is that the control over
timing shifts from the director or the designer of a computer game to the user.
So because the user can choose where they want to look and
sometimes where they want to go, as a designer,
you have to give up that control and you have to find ways to design
games and experiences which except the fact that
the user is going to have more control than
on a computer game or in a video or traditional animation.
Have you got any ideas or tips for how to do that?
Well, one thing people have been doing is drawing
upon some of the lessons learnt from immersive theater.
So, dividing stories up into beats and saying it doesn't really
matter what people do between A and B as long as they get to B,
and thinking about the different beats that the story will hit,
and you found this in some of the work from Oculus Story Studio,
so there's a game called Henry.
And they discovered this idea of beats that as long as this happens over there,
it doesn't matter what happens in between.
So it's a a looser way of telling stories.
And you've also talked in the past about magic as
an interesting background to doing immersive UX.
Could you talk what we can learn about from magicians and the effects of magic?
Yeah, there's some great stuff done by Derren Brown did a theme I think at Thorpe Park,
and there's a big immersive VR experience called the Void.
And both of those are done by people with background in stage magic.
So they really understand how to sell
illusions and there's a phrase by one of
the founders of the Void called the path to conviction,
and that means how do you take someone from
normal reality and bring them into the world of the virtual reality,
because just putting a headset on,
people are often quite confused and they may look at the wrong thing,
it's quite a sharp cliff to jump off.
So, drawing people in to the world, that's, again,
something I think we can learn from magic,
and it's really about how to set an illusion.
Are there any particularly good examples of VR,
UX that you could point out learners to that they could go out and see now?
To me, the best single experience is something called the Lab on the Vive,
and it's a free collection of demos and it's really
two years of Valve experimenting
with different game mechanics and different ways of approaching it,
and there's some really lovely stuff in there.
My favorite demo within the Lab is a robot dog where you
throw a stick and the dog runs off and fetches the stick and brings it back to you,
and it's just an incredibly pleasing piece of interaction design
which is suited to the limitations of the controller.
So you can throw a stick with a Vive controller,
and the way they've done it is just to beautiful piece of interaction design.
Dr Sylvia Xueni PanLecturer, Department of Computing
Dr Marco GilliesSenior Lecturer
