Design: Extended Reality Design

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 column on extended reality (XR), I discussed some of the bigger-picture themes that have led to the creation of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), as well as some of the fundamental building blocks that determine the effectiveness of an XR experience. In this installment of my XR mini-series, I’ll continue by discussing some core considerations to keep in mind when designing an XR experience—from how to approach designing the first minute of an experience to experience-wide design decisions, including user agency, interaction capabilities, and virtual personas.

The First 60 Seconds

When designing for augmented or virtual reality, particularly the latter, you must introduce the user to an experience that may range from slightly different—for example, fairly passive AR—to wildly different—very imaginative VR. In doing so, you’ll likely include some sort of narrative and a set of interactions that lets the user pursue that narrative. 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