VR Sandbox UI Mockups

The most useful use case in VR sandbox environments had to be multi-user collaboration in abstract brainstorming activities. This coupled with efficient locomotion and perspective toggling proved to be a very interesting use case that proved to be more effective than any other brainstorming activity currently available.

We experimented with various interfaces for users to build and explore spaces. Building spaces in VR in 1st person proved to be far less effective than building in 3rd person.

This made perspective toggling critical in VR when it came to sandbox environments. Although 3rd person interactions were far more productive in building spaces, fine tuning and adjustments were equally as effective in 1st person.

Virtual user experiences bring us closer to converging the virtual and real world. Thus, it makes more sense to utilize voice as much as possible instead of virtual keyboards and other input modalities that create bottlenecks in the experience.

We also realized that 1st person input in modeling and building environments was still less efficient that 3rd person input modalities we are used to in 3D modeling and illustration software.

Pushing technological capabilities is critical in getting VR to mass adoption. However, technical limitations still exist and managing user expectations is critical in successful VR user experiences for today’s generation of hardware.

Often we can get 80% of the benefits with 20% of the effort and we need to follow these rules in all aspects of experience design including the abstraction of input modalities.