Almost fifteen years after Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was released back in 1995 in the United States and discontinued in 1996, we are seeing the advent and emergence of Virtual Reality, a concept that has risen from the old theories but brought to life and practicality after we could better understand the logics and dynamics associated with its successful progression.
Just like any experience to work well for the users, Virtual reality too needs a great deal of focus and stress to be laid on its designing strategies as designing for a flat screen and for an immersive experience are two completely bipolar challenges.
With the course of evolution we have grown to better understand and implement designs drawn on paper to the designs drawn in the form models thus moving from literal to abstract. This is where the perspective of a user comes into play along with many other overlooked factors. Here we have discussed a few of them in detail:
Understand User Perspective: Designers need to understand a user’s perspective in order to take a better advantage of the fundamental prospect. As perspective plays a vital role in every user’s thought process thus we use the essentially signature tools and aspects to depict the hierarchy and flow of information in a design such as size, color, contrast and distance of elements. These elements play as much of an important role in VR as in the flat website design which is implementing these aspects is a must but keeping in mind the perspective in VR.
Use the Field of View to your advantage: In VR, designers need to implement 2D solutions into a 3D design layout which accentuates a different field-of-view in the virtual reality environment. Therefore, designing must be according to the central cone of focus which showcases the main elements while the peripherals can be used for supplementary information as well as for embedding surprise elements.
Build to Scale in VR: Seeing the rapid progress in the field one can easily predict that the future of VR holds better and lighter VR headsets with smaller yet denser screens offering higher resolutions. This is why it must be kept in mind by the designers to design as well as to scale the content to fit the resolutions. Scaling also applies to various other elements within the VR environment so as to highlight a particular object which may seem nearer and vice versa for those lying far.
In the end we can say that establishing a user experience in VR has many a vital things in common with designing User Experience in Flat or material designs however, VR offers significant new challenges for which we must employ creativity and innovation at its best.
