Exploratory Virtual Reality

For a little less than a year, I have been the owner of an HTC Vive virtual reality headset. I bought it because I was real curious to try out virtual reality. After playing with it for a while, I started getting ideas for things that I wanted to try to implement. Well, actually, I got ideas for things that I wanted to experience, and then I realized that I had to implement them if I would.

Some of my experiments turned out so well that I really wanted to share the results, and that's why I created this blog. Today, I want to give you an idea of what I think the blog is going to be about, and some thoughts that have formed along the way about what it is that I'm really trying to do.

Interacting with (Virtual) Reality

The thing that has got me most hooked on VR is the direct interaction you get with the virtual environment. It's really rewarding to have an idea, prototype it, and then step into VR and physically interact with the result. In my view, the way that the virtual environment reacts to your actions contributes a huge part to the VR experience.

It seems to me that the most direct and immersive experiences come about by using physical metaphors, mimicking physical interactions with the VR. That's not strange because you get to tap into a whole host of conscious and subconscious facilities that we humans use to interact with the physical world.

Game designers use metaphors all the time. If you can find a good metaphor, you can explain something complicated or (otherwise) unexpected almost without having to explain it. If you have played Plants vs Zombies, know that there's a good reason that you are playing with plants. The premise is that you can't move a unit once you have placed it, and this is exactly what you expect from a plant! (Example stolen from this excellent column.)

I believe that the direct interaction in VR gives access to a whole new level of physical metaphors, that don't engage just the mind but many of our innate facilities as well. The aim of this blog is to share my experiences as I experiment with different ways to interact with VR. Go on and read my other posts if you want to get straight to those experiments!

For now, I'd like to share some thoughts about the bigger picture of what I'm trying to achieve.

The Dream of VR

Remember the time when you couldn't go out and buy a VR headset for home use? You could read about virtual reality from time to time, though.

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who had an idea about what VR would be like, once I would finally be able to try it. The image is a bit fuzzy, but I'm quite sure that it involved going to fantastic places and doing fantastic things. Basically, it was a blank canvas for the imagination: Imagine anything. You can do it in VR. It didn't involve any limitations such as what the VR could sense or what kind of impressions it could give back to you.

Now, VR (real VR) is amazing, but of course it can't live up to such grand expectations. At the same time, when you have tried a bunch of real VR games and applications, it's easy to think that what you get is all that VR actually is. That you will always have to teleport to move more than a few meters in the virtual space (unless maybe someone develops an affordable omnidirectional treadmill), that you will always feel like a ghost that can go straight throught objects and scenery, etc...

The Limitations

When working with VR, it's important to understand the limitations that separate the dream from the reality. Here are some important ones:

• There's a limited number of things that you can measure. For the Vive, you get the position of the headset and one controller in each hand. I expect this to increase a bit over time, though.
• The virtual environment has to respond in certain ways close enough to how a physical environment would, or the user will feel sick. I will refer to this as VR sickness, and it's a major reason that some of the other limitations matter.
• You can't push the physical user. This makes it hard to push anything that the user controls through motion controls (but there may be some ways). Eventually, we may see more haptic feedback, but it will likely be limited, as it should be so that it won't hurt people.
• In particular, you can't make the user´s vestibular system (sense of balance) feel like it's accelerating when the user is standing still. This puts limitations on how you can move the user around in a virtual world.
• If the user moves around physically, it will most likely be on a flat floor. This makes it hard to move between different elevations, or across slopes, stairs, and so on.
• The user's movement will be limited to a play area of a few square meters (mine is a little more than 2m x 2m, which is the minimum for the Vive). The user can't walk very far in the physical space.

The Possibilities

But I don't think that it's time to stop dreaming yet! VR is a new medium and we have just begun to explore it. Looking at just the few experiments that I have done so far, I feel there's a vast space left to explore of how we can interact with virtual environments, even within the limits of the current technology. We're not going to achieve the dream, but we may come further than we think.

The limitations up above are the ones that I have found the most important. You have to respect them, but there may be more ways to respect them than you think. That's one thing that I think that the exploration of VR will be about.

The technology has its limitations, but they don't have to limit VR to the set of interactions that are common in VR games and applications today. I've only tried a few different ways to interact with VR so far, but I'm sure there's plenty more. Of course, I might not be the first to try them. Either way, I'd really like to share those experiences! Please read on if you'd like to know about some of my experiments!