Inclusivity in VR Development - Grace Hopper 2015
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
2 likes•506 views
The slide deck accompanying my Grace Hopper 2015 lightning talk on inclusive VR development. How considerations on spatial awareness, motion sickness, and physical presence helps the development of experiences that work well for the masses.
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Inclusivity in VR Development - Grace Hopper 2015
Similar to Inclusivity in VR Development - Grace Hopper 2015 (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Inclusivity in VR Development - Grace Hopper 2015
- 1. 2015 Inclusivity in VR Development Livi Erickson 10.14.2015 #GHC15 2015
- 2. 2015 About Me Livi Erickson Virtual & Augmented Reality Developer Evangelist Microsoft Livi.Erickson@Microsoft.com @MissLiviRose on Twitter
- 3. 2015 Why Inclusive VR? My experiences in a rapidly growing branch of computing
- 4. 2015 Why Virtual Reality? The Approach Immersive computing makes technology more relatable Powerful experiences that more closely reflect our real-world behaviors The Benefits Memories formed in VR are more closely related to memories of real-world experiences Higher degree of empathy
- 5. 2015 Building VR Experiences 1. User can look anywhere and expects content 2. Presence matters, immensely
- 6. 2015 Inclusion in VR Spatial awareness Motion sickness Body presence: does my virtual self reflect how I view myself in the physical world? − Gender − Age − Life Experiences
- 7. 2015 Observation My Fear: I am absolutely terrible at navigation in video games! Is this going to translate into doing worse in VR apps?
- 8. 2015 Spatial Awareness The ability to be aware of one’s self and objects in 3D space
- 9. 2015 Spatial Awareness: Maze Navigation Men complete virtual mazes 33% more quickly than women and utilize both halves of the hippocampus to create a mental representation of their environment Women use only the right hippocampus during maze navigation, relying on landmarks to construct an exit strategy Purvis et. all, 2004
- 10. 2015 Spatial Awareness Not well-understood: certain studies suggest that differences are due to confirmation bias
- 11. 2015 Spatial Awareness: Potential Impact Some people may have a harder time navigating through virtual environments Interacting with virtual objects may not be as intuitive
- 12. 2015 Observation I notice as I give & observe demos that men generally stay in a VR app longer than women. It’s also very difficult to judge whether I’m going to feel motion sick from a given app.
- 13. 2015 Motion Sickness The result of conflicting sensory information from our nervous system inputs
- 14. 2015 Motion Sickness: 3D Visual Cues Figuring out an object’s position is done through shape-from-shading and motion parallax Women will prioritize cues form shape-from- shading over motion parallax An example of shape-from-shading at high and low intensities. Princeton University
- 15. 2015 Impact Individuals with higher sensitivity to motion sickness may physically be unable to experience certain applications
- 16. 2015 Observation I don’t feel as present in VR games when I look down and see a male body.
- 18. 2015 Body Presence: Physical Comfort 1. Height 2. Character body 3. Inter-pupillary distance
- 20. 2015 Looking Ahead 1. Ensure you’re testing with a diverse user pool
- 21. 2015 Looking Ahead 1. Ensure you’re testing with a diverse user pool 2. Remove unnecessary “self” details that can detract from presence
- 22. 2015 Looking Ahead 1. Ensure you’re testing with a diverse user pool 2. Remove unnecessary “self” details that can detract from presence 3. Innovate around lighting & shadowing to remove unnatural behaviors
- 23. 2015 Looking Ahead We need more research & experimentation!
- 24. 2015 Contact Information Livi Erickson Livi.Erickson@Microsoft.com @misslivirose
- 25. 2015 Got Feedback? Rate and review the session on our mobile app Download at http://ddut.ch/ghc15 or search GHC 2015 in the app store
Editor's Notes
- Talk about why immersive computing has so much potential. Experience events and storytelling from multiple perspectives Create and test experiments that can’t be done in real life as easily Synthesize information spatially Increase comfort of personal computing Although VR from a wide-scale consumer adoption standpoint is still in infant stages, benefits of virtual reality technologies are already being formed.
- New considerations for building VR experiences: you have to build solutions that cover the entire sphere of view around a user, you can’t build for one specific body type or gender, your experience has to be symbiotic with your user’s physical actions Users will expect their entire surrounding area to be replaced. Different from how we view a screen that has a smaller area of content The connection to the digital representation is more important than ever – browsing the web does not require us relating to another digital being the way VR does Physical actions play a much greater part in VR - your motions at a traditional computer are limited to mouse+typing (perhaps some touch) but in VR, your motions vary and being “wrong” in how they map to the virtual self is more problematic. Also consider things like sitting vs. standing.
- Physical differences between men and women = VR differences for men and women
- It’s suggested that hormones play a role in spatial awareness
- Women are considerably more likely to suffer from motion sickness than men – generally thought to be related to hormone levels. In VR, this effect may be exacerbated by other factors that contribute to motion sickness.
- Biological men are significantly more likely to utilize visual cues from motion parallax (good in VR) than women, who are significantly more likely to utilize shape-from-shading (much harder to get perfect in CG) Motion Parallax: How we understand an object’s size based on how fast it moves in relation to us Shape from shading: Estimation of surface normal to indicate shadowing / reflection – harder to get right due to the nature of how recursively deep calculation of surface normals can be done (shadows & lighting)
- A scene from Owlchemy labs’ Job Simulator, where the player is being instructed by a robot how to cook. The developers noted that in their testing process, they found that shorter players struggled to reach some crucial objects in the scene. Mobility limitations also resulted in some testers attempting to rely on the virtual table to provide support. Playing in a seated vs. standing position and the sense of self A male avatar vs a female avatar
- Height: On average, men are taller than women. Accounting for height and body size with positional tracking, how hardware is developed, and within the experience can have an impact on the usability of a virtual reality application. Use example from Owlchemy Labs with Job Simulator Character Body: When in doubt, go without – our brains are more easily convinced of ownership of a digital self when the body is invisible over a visible but not matching body (e.g. a male avatar for a female player, and vice versa) Inter-pupillary distance: the distance between eyes plays an important role in rendering content stereoscopically. It’s important to respect the player settings and calculate accordingly to account for a difference in average and mean IPD – 70mm vs 65mm (men / women 95th percentile data)
- Making sure that experiences are being tested by a diverse user pool will help identify “edge” cases that are no longer edge cases for virtual reality Remove unneeded “identifying” factors that a user may not relate to that would break the sense of presence – e.g. is there a gendered breathing noise on your character that may not match up with the player?
- Making sure that experiences are being tested by a diverse user pool will help identify “edge” cases that are no longer edge cases for virtual reality Remove unneeded “identifying” factors that a user may not relate to that would break the sense of presence
- We need more information around how different people react in virtual environments and study in how we can build experiences that adapt well to a diverse pool of users. These areas include improvements and innovation in graphics programming, optimization, and testing for a diverse user base; it also includes a need for software engineers to work closely with other scientific fields in understanding how and why our brains work the way that they do in virtual environments. There isn’t a ton of information out there, but this is the tip of the iceberg, and it’s imperative that we make advancements to ensure that VR is a safe and inclusive new medium for all.
- This is the last slide and must be included in the slide deck