VEIL has worked to establish itself as a hub for VR interaction pattern research and collaboration by looking across the landscape of Virtual Reality. Their goal is to identify, catalog, and quantify immersive interaction design patterns. To do this, founders Suzan Oslin and Rob Dongas got to work recruiting researchers from UX design, development, data analysis, clinical psychology, education, and entrepreneurs from all around the world, who all shared an interest in understanding how to design more effective VR experiences, and learning how to leverage that in the creation of all immersive experiences.
Marg Laing started exploring VR during the lockdown in London. She came across VEIL’s call for volunteers whilst exploring opportunities to work on user research for VR products, and signed up as an evaluator. She was curious about “…how information architecture and experience design could adapt to completely different boundaries, constraints, navigation, and interaction”.
Marina Roselli was one of the first team members to join the project. She came from an art and design background and worked as a UX designer and researcher at a VR/AR games studio in Vancouver (Archiact) before returning to New York as a consultant. A creative problem-solver at heart, she is interested in cataloging what makes a VR experience satisfying, how to tutorialize novel interactions, and methods to create worlds that feel transformative yet intuitive at the same time.
VEIL was drawing expertise from many different areas touched by VR, but VR is still very much an emerging field. As Roselli put it,
“VR has had a pretty long history, but not for its users and not for the UX industry … This industry is a little bit of the Wild West, where what works and what doesn’t work in design are still things we are figuring out”.
VEIL realized the industry needed a study that would satisfy both the scientific rigor of the academic world and also be applicable for practitioners in the professional world. The academic world needed a mixed methods quantitative and qualitative evaluation, while the practical world needed to catalog design patterns and build a framework for evaluation that could be applied to any VR title.
Prior to launch, a preliminary test of each product category was made to see what was and wasn’t working on the evaluation form. Then the team took different academic resources and started affinity mapping these concepts to create a taxonomy of patterns that would help to better quantify the data. In order to create a test that was flexible enough to cover any number of combined interaction patterns, they pushed the limits of what was available on Qualtrics. This created a more rigorous test, as they belabored over specific wording, and even created a companion document to the evaluation. They knew it would be important that all researchers have a shared understanding of the taxonomy to align the data inputs.
As Laing puts it, “To see and experience VR is one thing, but to discuss and understand it you need to find a new vocabulary to express what you are perceiving”. VEIL has given her an opportunity to “explore the anatomy and linguistics of the virtual experience”.
In addition, VEIL was interested in comparing interaction patterns against measures of presence, embodiment, and heuristics. The evaluation includes three industry-standard questionnaires: ‘Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire’ by Bob G. Witmer and Michael J. Singer, ‘Avatar Embodiment. A Standardized Questionnaire’ by Tabitha C. Peck and Mar Gonzalez-Franco, and ‘Heuristic Evaluation of Virtual Reality Applications’ by Alistair Sutcliffe and Brian Gault. By incorporating these established measures, they could find correlations suggesting what design elements and interaction patterns were most effective.
The result is the Immersive Design Patterns Study. Together, team members aim evaluate 96 VR titles across 16 categories and record their findings in a highly in-depth evaluation. The evaluation is designed to capture both structured objective data and subjective data, for a rich data set that can generate a variety of insights.
The result will be an online repository of design patterns within VR, where designers can choose the best cases for their needs. VEIL is also building a knowledge base of terminology in order to help standardize VR research, as the terminology is still in development. According to Roselli,
“Even if you take the concept of presence and immersion — there is a way that certain people in the XR industry use those terms versus how people in the XR academic-industry use those terms, and they mean different things. … We’re trying to create something where we know very clearly ‘This is what it means. This is what we’re working with, and this is what, moving forward, we want people to use as well.”
VEIL has put a lot of effort into making sure the team has a common context for the understanding of the survey so that data is consistent across groups and individuals. The knowledge base, in addition to training and regular calls together, provides this shared context.
The team is really excited about the possibilities of this study and the chance to learn from each other. Although each team member brings a unique perspective and expertise in a different area, all are driven by a shared passion for design, technology, and opportunities to shape the future. If this sounds like you, your application to become a researcher is welcomed.
We’re also still on the lookout for content contributors to submit their VR titles for inclusion in our study. In exchange for granting our team access to your title, VEIL will:
- Cite your company in any peer-reviewed publications
- Include your logo on the Veilab.org website
- Add your logo to our LinkedIn contributors post
- Post curated and tagged social media content about your title
- Provide a summary of our evaluation for your specific title
Roselli is keen to bring in as many contributors as possible, saying:
“We want to make your training experiences better, we want to make your medical experiences better, we want to make your games better … How can we make better empathy-driven experiences? How can we show XR is a great tool to show somebody how to walk a mile in your shoes, how to experience something from somebody else’s perspective? There’s these great experiences out there, how can we make them better for you through the power of design?”
If you’re interested in having your title be included in the study, please submit your request to contribute.
If you’d like to know more about what’s going on at VEIL, please visit us at veilab.org, or follow us on LinkedIn, or Twitter.
Credit: written by Guy Stephenson
