Lesson 5- Social VR- The killer app for Virtual Reality
It’s coming
It can be argued that the most widely use case for VR today is gaming. For obvious reasons, gamers want full immersion to enjoy what they do! It’s no wonder we see hardcore gamers set up their places with several monitors and high-tech sound systems. With VR, it’s another level of immersion that gets them!
However, many predict that the ‘killer app’ for VR (an app that would lead to mass adoption for this technology) is Social VR. Think Facebook Spaces or AltSpace VR.
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With Social VR, you can hang out with your friends in a virtual world, and you can meet people from around the world in these destinations. Hell, there have been cases of people meeting in these virtual worlds and getting married in VR, followed by a marriage in REAL LIFE. Just like how the internet-enabled transactions in the real world, in the future, we will trade items/land/coins in virtual worlds for goods in the real world.
Some of the leading Social VR companies are Facebook Spaces, AltspaceVR, VTime, VRchat, Recroom, and high fidelity.
5 characteristics for designing Social VR UI
1. Social Signifiers: Think of signifiers as something that indicates that this has happened/happening. Do not confuse signifiers with affordances. Affordances give you cues as a way of directing you, but signifiers just indicate the state. An example of a signifier is a bookmark, which indicates your progress in the book.
An example of an affordance is a door/menu blinking or highlighted, indicating you to click there or go in that direction.
2. Social Focus: Social focus can be attributed to the ‘focus area’ of a setting. Think of going to a social place like a park, what is the focus area of a park? Usually, it is a statue or a pond or something of significance that people relate to when thinking of the park.
Similarly, when designing for Social VR, the participants have to be around a focal point, a place they can use as a ‘coordination’ point, to begin with. Imagine meeting friends in a virtual world with no common point to refer, you’d feel a bit lost.
Another example of this would be that of when a teacher enters a class. The kids are noisy and the teacher initially begins with a loud “okay class, silence please” in order to get the focus/attention of the kids. Having a focus area is one of the essentials of designing for Social VR.
3. Social behaviors: In a Social VR setting where multiple users are present, we have to identify their behaviors. What state are they in? What can they do? For example, on Instagram, you can follow/unfollow people, on chat you can send images, videos, links, etc. then there is a green dot to indicate that the user is online and available.
Similarly, what is the behavior like of participants in Social VR? What can the user do? Can we chat with other users? What level of consent do we require? (take an example of this woman being groped in VR- what a shame), Can we exchange tokens with each other for trade? etc.
When communicating with voice on Social VR, what is the behavior like of other participants? Facebook has done this brilliantly with head nods, raised eyebrows, gestures, etc. They’ve mimicked these behaviors from real-world behaviors, which makes it very realistic. It’s also important to note what others are doing and what is the shared context we are interacting in.
4. Tasks: When we get into Social VR, it’s important to clarify the tasks the users are/will be doing. Are you there just to explore? Collaborate? Are we playing a game like a treasure hunt? What exactly are your users doing in VR? Why are we there in the first place? What’s the task?
5. Presence: Arguably the most important element of any VR experience, but maybe most relevant in Social VR. When you socialize in the real world, what are the attributes that enable you to do so?
Being physically together is obvious, but there are attributes such as being able to see each other, verbal/non-verbal behaviors, gestures, ability to make eye contact, physical proximity between people, intimacy, safety, to name a few. Similarly, when designing for Social VR, it is important to take all this into consideration as it gives the user a sense of presence and believability.
Taking inspiration from the real world around us
According to Darwin, it’s survival of the fittest but it looks like it may not be entirely accurate. After all, we co-evolved and cooperated to get to where we are as a species. Take this quote from ‘Institute of the future’.
“Human history is a story of the co-evolution of tools and social practices to support even more complex forms of cooperation”- Institute for the Future
Accordingly, what are the elements that help is co-evolve? Can they be used to create realistic Social VR experiences? You bet!
1. Communication: We communicate, verbally/non-verbally and make sense of the world around us. Similarly, we have to design Social VR experiences that mimic real-world communication. What are our moods and emotions when we communicate? When we see someone in real life, we can get an idea of the mood they are in, and go from there. To make VR realistic, we have to have the ability to detect the mood in which other avatars are. No wonder that Microsoft has patented a ‘mood-sensing’ tech for HoloLens. How do we communicate in VR? Chat, voice, gestures, moods, etc. are a few examples we can take from the real world to make our virtual world feel realistic. One good example is how webinars have an icon for ‘hand raise’ which resembles our gesture to raise a hand when we have questions. Skeuomorphism is key to design for VR, which was widely overlooked over the past 2 decades in web/mobile 2D design.
2. Collaboration: Okay, now that we are in Social VR, what do we do? It’s not like I am solo, so when I have 3 friends around me, what is it we are doing? We are collaborating. Do not mistake collaborating with only limited to ‘team-meetings’ at work, collaborating could also mean a group of 4 friends playing a game. After all, we are collectively doing a task! Also, if we work in groups, it gives a sense of achieving a goal together, which makes it interesting. Hence, when designing for Social VR, we have to keep in mind what inputs are expected from whom, and when can we expect it. We’ve to make it feel natural. Voice alone cannot make it feel immersive, there have to be realistic gestures.
3. Coordination: We are exploring a place in VR, I find something, now what? I have to coordinate with you to tell you what has happened. What will we do in this game? What are our roles and responsibilities? It’s important that we are aware of our goals in this virtual world, and we can coordinate on what’s happening. For example, take WhatsApp: When User A is typing, User B is indicated that User A is ‘typing…’. This is an example of coordination, we are aware of who is doing what, so we don’t get lost (or break the immersion, in case of VR).
In this post, I’ve explored some UX essentials for designing Social VR. To get deeper into how Facebook did it, you can check out this talk by Christophe Tauziet who has worked as a product designer at Facebook Spaces.
Interesting things in VR this week:
This video below showcases a new technology that can make you feel cold or hot in virtual reality- damn, this blew my mind!!!!
VR prototype template
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