Published in ·
--
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are exciting. Why? They promise to teleport us anywhere in the world, let us sculpt objects out of thin air, treat diseases ranging from autism to dementia, and more importantly, tell us if that cute guy across the bar is checking us out. There are amazing things that AR and VR will do for us in the future.¹
There’s a sizeable gap between what AR & VR are capable of today and the future that everyone is so excited about. Generally speaking, AR & VR headsets are too bulky, have resolutions that are too low, lack processing power/battery life, and have narrow fields of view. The limitations of today’s hardware are preventing widespread adoption and restricting the number of AR & VR applications that make sense.
For example: A workspace with dozens of virtual ‘screens’ around you is an awesome idea. Unfortunately, the resolution of VR headsets is so low right now that all but the largest text is blurry. Good luck reading the 8pt font on one of your virtual monitors, 10 feet away. Today’s AR headsets have an extremely narrow field of view which prevents immersion and finding that cute guy in a crowded bar takes some serious processing power.
But great hardware isn’t the problem.
Big companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) are pouring truckloads of money into R&D to make better headsets. Eventually, headsets will be good enough to deliver the future that everyone is so excited about (just don’t ask anyone when). They’ll be small, light, and cheap enough for ‘regular people’ (a.k.a. consumers) to wear.
Building good AR & VR applications is incredibly difficult right now, though not because the development is hard. Game engines like Unity are surprisingly good for making AR & VR applications and they’re relatively easy for developers to learn. In the rush to get developers building AR & VR applications the tools designers and product managers need were forgotten. This is why designing AR & VR applications is hard. Really hard. It doesn’t matter how easily you can develop a poorly designed application.
When we first started building mobile apps over a decade ago, they, on average, sucked. But we’ve learned a lot. We figured out what interactions worked on touch screens (see long scrolling pages & pinch to zoom), developed and standardized mobile UI patterns (buttons big enough for your thumb) and we refined our design workflow.
Here’s the simplified design process for a mobile app:
The first four steps are particularly important because they allow product managers, business people, and UI/UX designers to user test and iterate without engaging the development team. Interactive prototypes are crucially important here. As the folks at IDEO say “If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.”
The feedback loop is also critical; great apps are forged in the Feedback Loop. When the development team finally gets to work, all of the really important decisions — the decisions that will make people like, or hate the app — have already been made. The process above is so widely known that launching a mobile app with less than a 4-star rating means someone really f*cked up, a lot (sorry Rogers).
We’ve spoken to dozens of large and small teams, working across every vertical. They’re all using different design processes. We found that AR & VR prototypes are being created using 2D design tools, pen/paper, and VR art tools.
A lot of designers create 2D interfaces with 2D design tools and throw those interfaces into AR & VR apps². Designing for 3D is NOT the same as designing for 2D. In AR & VR there’s another dimension to design for. Adding a dimension is like going from a keyboard to a keyboard and mouse. Adding another dimension changes everything. The tools used to design 2D applications will not be the same tools used to design AR & VR applications used by millions of people every day.
Many suggest prototyping simple VR experiences using a pen and graph paper with a 360° grid³. We’ve seen this method taught at reputable VR courses in the Bay Area. Others have created cardboard cutouts and taped them to their hands to understand how the UI will feel. I’m going to point out the obvious and say that 360° drawing is hard, and I’ll be damned if the best way to design an AR/VR application is with cardboard cutouts.
People that are familiar with AR & VR know how important it is to visualize their designs in a headset. They gravitate towards VR creative tools like Tilt Brush and Blocks to create rough sketches of their applications. After speaking to many designers working this way we learned these tools are great for creating artistic assets. Though, for a host of reasons these tools are not ideal for designing applications. In our next blog post we’ll dig into ‘why’.
The success of AR & VR relies just as much on the hardware as it does the software. To design great AR & VR apps we need design tools crafted specifically for AR & VR. Tools that will let us design 3D interfaces, create interactive prototypes, and do user testing BEFORE the first line of code is typed. We have a good idea of what these design tools should look like and we’re working to build them.
If you’re part of a team that’s even thinking about building AR & VR applications, you should check out our beta release of Sketchbox, a rapid prototyping tool for AR & VR. We’re just getting started.
P.S. We’re hiring
