The Design Of Everday VR Things
Even if our doors are virtual, we still use them like real doors.
If you read my last blog post, Developing Physics-Based VR Hands in Unity, you’d know that I think hands are the most interesting aspect of virtual reality (VR) game design. All the things we do with our hands as humans have existed in games, sure — games have doors you can open, buttons you can press, and objects you can throw, for example. But these interactions must be mediated by mechanical tools we call controllers, keyboards, and mice. These objects force us to simplify what you, the player playing the game, must do physically to make your avatar do something in return. Opening a door or pressing a button becomes pressing X. Throwing a ball becomes flicking an analog stick.
VR offers something more tactile, but therein lies the challenge for VR developers. In VR, we have a 1-to-1 mapping of your physical hand’s position and rotation; depending on the platform, we also have a pretty good approximation of your hand’s positioning via the grip or trigger buttons. This means we can make a virtual door that you physically grab and physically pull open, just like a real door.
That’s pretty cool! Now you might not need that “Press X to…” prompt on the screen. Who needs help opening a door, anyways? As it turns out, a lot of people. Exchanging a controller for a hand just changed the kind of design we should be thinking about.
In fact, confusing doors is literally an issue so common in the broader field of design that it’s a joke unto itself. They’re called Norman Doors, named after Don Norman. Norman wrote a very influential book on a design called The Design of Everyday Things. The book is about usability and ergonomics, which are fields of study about how the shape, placement, color, and other factors of objects in our world teach us how to use them or how they work.
One of the more famous examples of the confusing design is door handles. To Norman, the shape indicates not just how you should grasp the door but also what direction it swings or slides. These factors are just as important in VR precisely because hands are nothing more than how we use them. Even if our doors are virtual, we still use them like real doors.
For example, in Boneworks, your virtual body can collide with doors, yet you must often pull them open. They get the handles right, and the shape suggests grasping and pulling. However, the doors sometimes swing inwards. That’s tough in VR because it’s hard to move your body around the door as you open it. I often accidentally bumped doors closed when opening them or trying to walk around them. But the game is otherwise great!
In Loam, we’re planning on using sliding doors to alleviate this problem. This kind of thinking really should impact any portion of VR design that involves the player. In Vacation Simulator, you can adjust the height of most tables so they’re comfortable for how you’re playing. In Loam, we put the handle of the watering can on the back so you wouldn’t have to tilt your wrist as much as you play. We even picked a long, normally two-handed shovel and not a trowel because we don’t want to make players bend down repeatedly. This only scratches the surface of the field, and I’d recommend that all designers, but especially VR designers, look for solutions in the way actual objects solve similar problems.
Oh yeah, and read The Design of Everyday Things.
