As the VR headsets are becoming more affordable, a significant number of users from different fields of interest have the chance to experience VR for specific purposes. In other words, affordability has made it possible to reach a greater audience who has a greater potential for taking VR to the next era of digital experience. This easy access and potential usage has led users to focus on VR experience and developers to question how well VR experience can be achieved.

1. Virtual Reality
Experience for
10 Bucks!
Semester Writing Project | Irem Gokce Yildirim

2. Google Cardboard: An Accessible and
Affordable Virtual Reality (VR) Headset
● ~$10
● Phone-based VR Headset
● Do-it-yourself (DIY)
● Open Source Toolkit
● Accessible, affordable, transformable and
practical
● More content is needed! (Google I/O Conference, 2014)
● A very tiny design guideline

3. ARGUMENT
The designers and developers should be
educated about what good VR
experience is and provided design
guidelines accordingly to be able to
turn the affordability of headsets into great
VR experiences.
◦ Do they have enough information about how to
create good VR experiences?
◦ Are the design guidelines provided enough to
create a good VR experience?

4. From Sensorama to the Google
Cardboard
● Sensorama, “experience theatre”, 1955
● First head mounted display (HMD), Headsight,
1961
● 3D Display, LEEP Cyberface, 1989
Features: Head Mounted, Mobility, Controller Integration
Oculus Rift, Sony PlayStation VR, HTC Vive,
Microsoft HoloLens, Google Cardboard
1

5. What about VR Users?
● According to Kzero, the number of
users who participated in this
experience is around 28 million
○ half having gaming backgrounds
2

6. 170,000,000
expected number of people who will have
experienced VR by 2018

7. What about VR Users?
● Design principles for VR experience is in high
demand due to the huge amount of possible
users in the near future
● As the VR headsets are more affordable now, a
significant number of developers from
different fields of interests have had the
chance to develop an application using VR for
specific purposes.
2

8. Experience Design for VR
● What is VR?
● What is VR Experience?
● VR Experience Design
3

9. What is VR?
Virtual reality was a collection of
hardware (Steuer, 1992)
The “virtual reality” term was first
used in 1984 by Jaron Lanier, the CEO
of VPL Research Inc., a company
which produced motion-sensing
gloves and eyeglasses wired to a
computer to simulate reality.

10. “
“Virtual Reality is electronic
simulations of environments
experienced via head-mounted eye
goggle and wired clothing enabling the
end user to interact in realistic
three-dimensional situations.” (as cited
in Steuer, 1992)

11. What is VR?
● Introduction of calm technology (Weiser, 1996)
● Diffusion of devices into our environments
(Weiser, 1992)
● Disappearing devices (Streitz & Nixon, 2005)
Steuer (1992) argued that VR is more than
hardware, in fact, it is a “particular type of
experience”.

12. What is VR Experience?
Presence (and telepresence) (Steuer, 1992)
▫ “experience of natural surroundings”
▫ “sense of being in an environment”
improved by:
▫ Interactivity
■ manipulation, navigation, collaboration
▫ Vividness
Immersion (Sherman & Craig, 2002)
Sensory feedback (Sherman & Craig, 2002)
Physiological dimensions (Google Cardboard)
◦ simulation sickness
◦ control of movement

13. VR Experience Design
According to Sherman and Craig (2002)
◦ immersion,
◦ point of view,
◦ venue,
◦ simulation/physics
◦ objects/denizens

14. Ultimate Display
Ivan Sutherland (1965):
“If the task of the display is to serve as a
looking-glass into the mathematical
wonderland constructed in computer
memory, it should serve as many senses
as possible. So far as I know, no one
seriously proposes computer displays of
smell, or taste.”

15. VR Experience Design
According to Sherman and Craig (2002)
◦ immersion,
▫ serving senses (Sutherland, 1965)
◦ point of view,
◦ venue,
◦ simulation/physics
◦ objects/denizens
◦ familiarity (Sutherland, 1965)
◦ body control (Sutherland, 1965)

16. SENSES:
Representation of
objects (Maleshkov &
Chotrov, 2013)
◦ Explicit
properties
(appearance, sound)
◦ Implicit
properties (surface
roughness and
stiffness)
Findings
FAMILIARITY:
“Substitutional
Reality” (Simeone et
al., 2015)
◦ Mapping between the
objects in the real and
virtual environments
◦ when the mismatch
was high, the
believability of the
experience was low

17. PRESENCE (IMMERSION):
Effects of having an avatar, inviting the
user to do certain actions and looking
at the user (Steed et al., 2016)
◦ Avatar has positive effect on presence
◦ Invitation has negative effect on presence
Findings

18. Design Guidelines
Intended context
◦ VR for virtual
vehicle
▫ e.g. hand
gestures
◦ Gaming
▫ e.g.
immersion
Controls
◦ Control-less
methods
▫ magnetic
input
▫ infrared
pose
tracking
First Person
Experiment
◦ To set the
optimum values
for certain
features of VR
▫ e.g.
acceleration
A guideline including the mapping between VR
Experience Design components and design
elements (in application level)
Other design concerns:

19. Conclusion
● Providing information about VR experience
to developers & designers
○ Mapping between VR Experience
components and design elements
■ e.g. presence - avatars
○ More broad experimenting and usability
testings are necessary to improve our
knowledge about this new kind of
experience
● Creating a general VR design guideline based
on these mappings and experiment results
4

20. See Final Chapter :
https://goo.gl/9dkb9W

21. REFERENCES
Designing for Google Cardboard. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://www.google.com/design/spec-vr/designing-for-google-cardboard/
Google Developers. (2014). Cardboard: VR for Android. Google I/O 2014 Conference.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFog2gMnm44
Hopkins, C. (2015, May). Designing for Virtual Reality. Retrieved from
https://ustwo.com/blog/designing-for-virtual-reality-google-cardboard/
Maleshkov, S., & Chotrov, D. (2013). Affordable Virtual Reality System Architecture for
Representation of Implicit Object Properties. arXiv preprint arXiv:1308.5843.
Sherman, W. R., & Craig, A. B. (2002). Understanding virtual reality: Interface, application, and
design. Elsevier.
Simeone, A. L., Velloso, E., & Gellersen, H. (2015, April). Substitutional reality: Using the
physical environment to design virtual reality experiences. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3307-3316). ACM.
Steed, A., Friston, S., Lopez, M., Drummond, J., Pan, Y., & Swapp, D. (2016). An ‘In the
Wild’Experiment on Presence and Embodiment using Consumer Virtual Reality Equipment.
Steuer, J. (1992). Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence. Journal of
communication, 42(4), 73-93.
Streitz, N., & Nixon, P. (2005). The disappearing computer. Communications-ACM, 48(3), 32-35.
Sutherland, I. E. (1965). The ultimate display. Multimedia: From Wagner to virtual reality.
Virtual Reality Software Revenue Forecasts 2014 – 2018. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/virtual-reality-software-revenue-forecasts-2014-2018/
Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific american, 265(3), 94-104.
Weiser, M., & Brown, J. S. (1996). Designing calm technology. PowerGrid Journal, 1(1), 75-85.
OTHERS

22. Thanks!
ANY QUESTIONS?