1: Ideas
VR moves the space, mood, and intractability being developed by the creator’s/designers mind, from the imagination and into a shared space that someone else can engage with. In simpler terms: you can start to share your imagination with other people, and that’s really helpful and really cool.
Like… really cool.
It’s hard to convey just HOW IMPRESSIVE a space will be, unless you can literally plop someone into your vision. VR for architectural and event visualization does that. It’s hard to explain just HOW WELL an industrial-design solution solves a problem, without puting an end-user into a scenario. VR solves for this too because you can build-out a scenario, and have someone nationalistically interact with it… testing for problems or verifying opportunities.
2.Emotions
VR can provide for some truly surprising moments… and therefor it has a certain novelty factor because it allows for a very different set of interaction scenarios to play out. You will definitely be drawn to characters and worlds and circumstances MORE, because you can more organically interact with it.
Unlike a game being experienced through a monitor, using controllers that traditionally are simply a set of button-based-inputs… VR asks the human to move and act like they naturally have learned to. Nothing more… and so it breaks barriers and simplifies the experience to make it more digestible and personal. And that plays with your emotions more effectively.
Alright so, this might be clear to VR and AR enthusiasts, but I think it’s sometimes difficult to really translate the concept to audiences who have never tried either of these technologies. The difference between watching a 3D movie (which is what most people are probably familiar with) and a full-on VR experience is as vast as the virtual-gap between talking about a dream, and being inside a dream.
That explanation sounds confusing, but hear me out. When you put on a VR headset, it completely removes you from the world you physically exist within, and sort of like a horse with blinders on, it focuses your consciousness on this experience being projected towards your eyes. And with a one-to-one movement of what you’re physically experiencing in the real world you inhabit, married with the in-game camera running inside the game-engine, it truly creates an illusion of “being present” in this virtual space.
So why does that matter? Well honestly, I’m not a huge VR enthusiast myself…. it’s a challenging platform to develop content for: it’s a pain for sure to optimize things to run fast, and UI/UX is REALLY different challenge in VR where you want the experience to be a more natural interaction between the user and their perceived virtual space they’re in. These things, coupled with many limitations (the VR experience has to be simple enough to run very quickly, with almost no glitching or “lag” because it ruins the experience fast and makes people motion-sick very quickly), but I CAN attest to the magic it creates. And it can benefit both games AND design-development life-cycles in unique was.
I sort of straddle two worlds of interest. I’m never really happy with just one avenue of story telling, and so I’m a Creative Director and Designer by day… but then I’m a Game Developer by night, because I need the creative freedom that affords me. So I see the potential in VR and AR in two different lights…
For game/interactive experiences, VR offers something that can’t be rivaled in the usual keyboard-mouse/controller setup. It just can’t. You can argue with me all day, but honesty VR is a different experience alltogether and games developed for VR have a different creative “soul” to them because they can bring connectivity between the gamer and the game to a different level than otherwise.
Here’s a quick “for example” moment that acts as a simple illustration of VR’s subtle humanistic connection it can offer. Aside from just being a 3D experience you can nationalistically move your view withing (turn your head, and you can look wherever you want in the space… can’t get much more natural than that, right?), you can see in the image below that by using the two controllers in your hands (ergonomically developed to non-intrusively sit in your hands and pick up on the natural expansion and contraction of your fingers and palms), you can hold your hands outwards, towards the friendly “robot” that eagerly has its own hands outstretched towards you, the audience. It’s beckoning you to dance with it! And no, it’s not creepy like it sounds, it’s actually a really cool moment when you understand that grabbing its little virtual hands, it starts to bob and sway around, and its looking for the associated “bouncing” movements of your own hands from you ACTUALLY DANCING to react to and act happy.
It was sort of an “ah hah!” moment for me… where some clever game designer thought to get a virtual character in a virtual space to organically coerce you to become their dance-partner, and to let-loose and play with the virtual robot for a moment. That’s really different, and something I’ve never seen before. And for more examples of these subtle, but incredibly impactful “moments” that the tech can really surprise you with and grow empathy for the games’ characters, just check out the masterpiece ALYX from Valve software…. that one will blow your mind too. Anyway, check out the dancing robot partner below….
For design-development (and by this I mean architectural, product, spacial, event-concepting, etc.) it transports someone you’re trying to convey an imaginative idea to much more concisely than traditional methods Unlike a static image or even a pre-recorded 2-dimesnsional video “fly-through” of a space or a product or whatever else you’re trying to impose your creative vision of onto someone else unfamiliar with the imagery in your imagination, the VR experience allows them to explore. It’s that simple. Finally, someone can actually enter into a scenario or space or idea and you can very literally share the complete EXPERIENCE with them. That’s unique. That’s something really special.
When someone can explore and discover things for themselves, that’s when you can really connect with a client or other individuals you’re trying to provide a solution or vision to. While the argument of stylistic issues with a rendering or sketching style can always cause a level of confusion or a disconnect from the importance and grandeur or unique time-based impact you as a designer are suggesting, all of these things suddenly become possible in VR because you as a designer can bring people along on the “adventure.”
Playing with Pisces Game in VR… at least the visualized concept for what it would be. Submitted to Magic Lleap for approval a while ago.
And that’s pretty cool.
It will be interesting to see where it all goes. If VR can stick around for a while and not go the way of the dodo… or of 3D movies for that matter… and continue to find a market in the consumer electronics world, then there’s a lot of opportunity for the tech to continue to develop, and for content to become easier to produce-for. It still requires a beefy work-horse of a PC to run right now (but there’s hope for lighter-weight experiences within the wireless Oculus Quest to be sure), and the advent of Ray-traced Real-time Rendering like that enabled by the NVIDIA GTX series released 2 years ago, VR will inevitably become a dominant tool in the artist’s arsenal of creative weaponry!
My own exploration as of late has been to try and couple The Lost Pisces (I had the 3D assets and environments setup already, so it was easy enough) with some VR ideas. Not sure how FAR I’ll pursue it… like I said it’s not a simple translation of how you interact with the game from a standard controller UX to VR’s interaction abilities, but it was a fun exploration and who knows… if i finish the main game, I’d be super interested in playing wiht the smaller VR experience a bit more!