HW2: VR Critic, Best Practices Guide¶
Due date: 2024-08-17 23:59.
Part 1: Reading. The Oculus Best Practices Guide¶
In this first part of the assignment, you will become familiar with the Oculus Best Practices Guide. The Guide introduces the current standards for comfort and safety that VR developers use. As you might guess, not following these guidelines could lead to experiences that cause discomfort, eye strain, headaches, and nausea.
You can find the Guide following this link:
- Oculus Best Practices Guide: currently called Informative Guides to Help You Design, Develop, and Distribute Your VR App.
Take your time reading through the Guide and consider common issues that arise even in the most well-designed VR experiences. This will prepare you for further content in this course.
In the exercises below, answer our questions by referring to the Guide. In the second part of the assignment, you will use your VR Best Practices knowledge to critically evaluate some VR experiences we have set up for you. Therefore, ensure you read the Oculus Best Practices Guide carefully.
Part 2: Experience and Critisise.¶
Now that you are familiar with the Oculus Best Practices Guide, we ask you to download and review the following VR experiences:
- Stonemilker 360 Music Video by Björk, experience an immersive 360-degree music video that places you in the middle of Björk's performance, allowing you to feel like you are right there on an ocean shore in Iceland together with the artist.
- BBC Earth: Total Solar Eclipse, a 360-degree video showing a total solar eclipse as seen from space.
- Superman Roller Coaster, experience the thrill of a roller coaster ride in VR.
- Shadows Of Truth - Detective, embark on a chilling journey into the depths of mystery and intrigue with this detective game by Irusu.
- Graffiti Paint VR, this VR game is also available on the Play Store; it will let you use your creativity and create graffiti art.
Note: Make sure you always use your QR code generated in previous homework for the most comfortable experience, both in apps and on YouTube. To do this, every time your phone is in split screen VR mode, click on the gear settings icon and scan the saved QR code for each of your newly downloaded experiences.
For High-End HMD Users: If you own a high-end HMD, you may also download the following VR experiences from the Meta Store. To download and run these experiences on your headset, you need to find them in the Oculus Application’s library and install them. Then you can use these experiences to answer some of the questions below where appropriately.
Notice, that you still need to download the Carboard experiences on your phone and review them as well. This is an opportunity for you to compare the high-end HMD experiences with the Cardboard ones.
Become VR Critic¶
This assignment is meant to turn you into a VR snob; pick apart every little design decision you can think of, there are no right or wrong answers. We will give no penalty for writing longer (or shorter) answers, but as a guideline, each answer should be 1-2 sentences long.
For each experience, think about these general categories:
- Graphical/Aesthetic Quality.
- Interaction.
- User interface.
- Movement.
- Immersion/Presence.
- Comfort.
For each category, identify which of the VR experiences does well and which one does poorly. Think of suggestions on how to improve the corresponding experience. Make sure to back up your critiques and suggestions with evidence from the Best Practices Guide.
Provide Citations¶
When appropriate, provide section names and direct quotes from the Best Practices Guide to cite a given observation.
Example:
The menu feels too close to the eyes which may cause discomfort. Instead, UI elements should be incorporated into the virtual world as 3D objects. [1]
In footnotes:
[1] Vision -> Comfortable Viewing Distances: …should be rendered at least 0.5 meters away…
Authors¶
Anna LaValle.
Give feedback on this content
Leave your comments below: