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Necessary Enhanced Abilities for Virtual Reality

Tbone
Protege
I want to share a few ideas I had about the best way to handle communication, locomotion, and interaction in VR. The concepts are simple, and most are obvious, but I thought it was worth sharing. Some of these are universal and should probably be adopted in every virtual reality experience. Others depend on the situation. I've come to these conclusions from lots of non-VR gaming as well as beta testing many VR experiences.

I think the impulse is to design virtual reality to simulate reality as closely as possible. While that may be a good start, there are many things about reality that are inconvenient and would prove cumbersome in virtual reality. There are also some things that are easy in reality but hard in virtual reality for the foreseeable future. The easiest way I like to think of this is "what enhanced superhero abilities will make my transition to virtual reality easier and more enjoyable?". Here are a few:

TELEKINESIS - controlling matter with your mind

Ok, so obviously you wouldn't literally be using your mind, but Telekinesis is probably THE most important enhanced ability that should be adopted by nearly EVERY VR experience. Sooner rather than later, will will have motion VR input (like the Hydra, but much better). Once we have it, though, we'll want to start picking things up and interacting with them! The Oculus Rift, however, is designed for a seated experience. If something is on the ground, and I reach to pick it up, I'll probably lose my hand tracking and possibly my head tracking too. Even if the tracking was perfect and I was standing, how many times would I crouch all the way down to the ground to examine or pick something up before I'd get sick of doing it and complain about my back? I have a shitty back, so probably not that long.

Telekinesis in virtual reality means the ability to point at an object that can be held, press a button or make a gesture, and fly that object straight into my hand. You could put a halo or glow over the object to indicate it is available for Telekinesis and put whatever distance limit you want. You shouldn't have to worry about making this work in the "lore" of your game. This should be a commonly accepted practice among nearly all virtual reality experiences.

TELEPATHY - communication via direct link

This one is for social VR experiences - things like VRChat, MinecRIFT, or whatever Metaverse-like thing comes down the tubes. 3D positional audio is awesome in VR, and it's a lot of fun to talk to someone in a virtual space and know who is talking and where they are. Text chat is horrible in VR. Even at a high enough resolution to read, feeling for the keyboard keys is a pain. You should assume that the VR of the near future will NOT involve a keyboard and mouse. That means most all communication will be voice. If you're going to have 3D positional audio in your experience, you should have Telepathy as well.

Telepathy means you can link to a person or a group in your experience and communicate regardless of where you are. It's basically like a phone call. Or Skype. Or Teamspeak. As a guild leader, I think this is essential for meeting up with friends and performing tasks as a team. Currently we play Rust. We use Teamspeak to stay in communication at all times, but everyone else we only talk to via positional audio when we are close to them. Your players shouldn't have to rely on an external source for this, however. Siri-like integration would be ideal eventually, but a simple UI with a list of friends/saved groups will do. You can give the voices an effect so it sounds like they are in a player's head or at least to differentiate between external audio and Telepathy audio. Call waiting, etc. can also be implemented.

FLIGHT

This one will be situational. Obviously many experiences are designed to be explored slowly and from a certain perspective only. If you are doing virtual tourism or any other large place to explore, however, you should consider allowing the ability to fly. It won't be for everyone, but Firebox handles this great. I enter a portal and explore a few rooms. I may go 4 or 5 rooms deep and decide I want to leave and go back. I really don't want to have to slowly walk back through all the rooms, though. Flight is one way to fix this.

Flight in virtual reality is a way of speeding up movement. In Firebox, enabling flight increases the movement speed quite a bit. It also allows you to design and build upward or downward instead of being forced to design in a traditional way only. If this is something that would make your experience more convenient, design for it early on! Flight can also be a solution to movement in general. It may be an easier VR experience for the player to believe they are hovering above the ground flying around than trying hard to mimic walking. With the right audio and animations (hey, how about a hover board!), this could become the most common means of locomotion in VR!

TELEPORTATION

Another great solution to exploration implemented by Firebox. We've all read Ready Player One and Snowcrash where people are expected to get on virtual ships and fly to virtual planets or ride on virtual motorcycles to get anywhere. Exciting to think about, but it's not at all practical or convenient, and it's not how our current Metaverse (the World Wide Web) works. So if you are designing a virtual hangout space or exploration space, consider allowing Teleportation.

Teleportation in virtual reality is the ability to pull up coordinates/addresses/bookmarks and instantly go where you want to. In Firebox, you can type in an address and a portal appears directly in front of you. Click that portal and can walk straight into your destination. It's very cool and super convenient! I'm not saying don't design a cool spaceship and planet and transportation system. I'm just saying give people options so that if they only have 10 minutes and want to spend it checking out your cool stuff, don't force them to go through 30 minutes of travel to reach it.

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That's all I've come up with so far, but feel free to add your own if you think of anything. I'm of the belief that VR is for immersion while your smartphone is for convenience. This means gaming and media will be on your VR headset while information and communication will be on your smartphone. One way to bridge this gap is to try to make VR as convenient as possible, so I think these "enhanced abilities" are a start. At least try Telekinesis. The others largely depend on if you are designing a social experience or not, but they are all worth considering. Virtual Reality allows us to break laws of nature. We don't have to limit our experiences based on reality. Let's design something smarter than that =P
8 REPLIES 8

MiloSavage
Explorer
I'm thinking a team survival experience like the 'Jumper' movie using the mechanics you described. A massive data base of scenes from all over the world that u can teleport between using voice commands. Having to rob banks etc to get money for better gear/hide outs etc. Telepathic voice chat between jumpers trying to stay ahead of the 'paladins'. People are actually going to get addicted to having these 'powers' to the point that they wont like the real world any more lol. looking forward to it. 🙂

diablosv21
Honored Guest
"MiloSavage" wrote:
I'm thinking a team survival experience like the 'Jumper' movie using the mechanics you described. A massive data base of scenes from all over the world that u can teleport between using voice commands. Having to rob banks etc to get money for better gear/hide outs etc. Telepathic voice chat between jumpers trying to stay ahead of the 'paladins'. People are actually going to get addicted to having these 'powers' to the point that they wont like the real world any more lol. looking forward to it. 🙂

+1

cubytes
Protege
TELEKINESIS - controlling matter with your mind
TELEPATHY - communication via direct link
FLIGHT
TELEPORTATION


Awesome! Very interesting ideas. I agree these powers should definitely be implemented in some standardized way across all virtual world experiences otherwise it will be a complete mess trying to learn and relearn how to do these actions or powers for each individual virtual world or virtual reality.

Honestly I haven't gotten this far just yet. I have been focusing more on a VR equivalent for a "main menu" or "desktop". My main goal is to instantly immerse users into VR in a semi-stationary main menu that leverages positional tracking in a very interesting way.

I think action orbs would be a very simple way to have all these powers at your fingertips. You would have an action orb that floats and follows you around like a companion would in an ARPG (but this companion would just float through anything). when you need a in game menu you simply stop moving then look at the orb for x amount of seconds and an in game menu emerges from the orb. to close the menu you can close it from the menu or just simply look away and the in game menu automatically fades back into the orb.

use action orbs menus to:
-turn off and on game settings such as persistent on screen reticle/cursor
-you can use action orb menus to initiate a telepathic shout or telepathic direct call
-use action orbs to highlight and pull in objects via telekinesis
-use action orbs to teleport

flying and any kind of movement in a virtual world/reality will most likely be tied to some physical controller for now so no need to use an action orb for that...

cubytes
Protege
Awesome! Very good suggestions and ideas for consideration. I would love to help you in this quest that seeks to standardize these "action/powers" across all virtual world/realities. i think "action orbs" would be a good starting point. Thanks for sharing your insight Tbone. Much Appreciated.

Tbone
Protege
Thanks for reading! Does the "action orb" idea assume a certain input method? If you were just wearing gloves and had limited buttons, I could see the need for a floating menu like you describe, but for the most part I feel like you want to make these actions as seamless and natural as possible. Just brainstorming implementation based on various inputs...

Telekinesis should probably be an always-on fuction. Whatever you are using to aim, when you hover over the item, it gives you an indication (or not if that is part of your game design). Your "use" function would fly the object into your hand (trigger, A button, whatever would be on a glove). This is used enough that it should be a primary function.

Telepathy is a bit more complicated. It probably will require a menu system. You can link from a friends list or have saved group chats in the menu. Like Teamspeak, these could basically be channels. When you are in your "guild channel", using the voice comm will communicate with any guild member also in that channel. If you want to link to a specific person, it could be like a phone call where they get a notification and accept. It could get more complicated in terms of having one button as a whisper button and one as a group/general button. Certainly for group telepathy, you would want push-to-talk, so again you would need another button. Voice activation could be toggled on for one-on-ones. I think this menu/friend/group system will vary widely from online game to online game. The important thing is that voice communication is available, as text chat is not ideal in VR.

In Firebox, Flight is a toggle mode. Hit spacebar or F and you switch. This is pretty convenient. If affordable, it should be something that can be assigned to a button rather than having to go into a menu to toggle on and off.

Teleportation could be pre-implemented into the experience ("here's the teleport back to the start"). If you wanted to give this control to the user, implementation would largely depend on your system of addresses/coordinates. For Firebox, you hit tab, type in the address, and then enter. The portal then appears directly in front of you. If we're trying to avoid the keyboard, your system might would need some sort of map or database that could be pulled up easily.

So Telekinesis and Flight should be quick and accessible. Telepathy should be easy to access once it is set up, but linking with someone else or with a group will probably need its own system. Teleportation (in a large online experience) will require a lot more thought to develop an intuitive system if you want to avoid the keyboard.

In truth I think assigning the menu to a button or gesture would work better than staring at the orb. The orb would either require an odd enough neck angle so that it is out of your way when you don't want it, or it would be easy to look at but would constantly get in the way and result in accidental menu opens. That's my thought, anyway.

cubytes
Protege
Thanks for reading! Does the "action orb" idea assume a certain input method? If you were just wearing gloves and had limited buttons, I could see the need for a floating menu like you describe, but for the most part I feel like you want to make these actions as seamless and natural as possible. Just brainstorming implementation based on various inputs...


yea man no problem. love the insight keep it coming!

no input assumption. once the menu emerges from the action orb any input method the user has at their disposal could be used to interact with it.

yup that is my goal to make these actions as seamless and natural as possible preferably all in game menu based to keep the immersion factor up. im not against full screen menus persay but to a certain extent full screen menu obscures the immersion.

Telekinesis should probably be an always-on fuction. Whatever you are using to aim, when you hover over the item, it gives you an indication (or not if that is part of your game design). Your "use" function would fly the object into your hand (trigger, A button, whatever would be on a glove). This is used enough that it should be a primary function.


true that. good point. I agree telekinesis should be like a best practice always on kind of primary function no need for a menu or anything. with one caveat; you can only snatch objects that actually belong to you or objects that are public domain. might need to come up with some kind of object ownership status? not sure if snatch and grab is really an issue for VR optimized experiences at this point...

Teleportation could be pre-implemented into the experience ("here's the teleport back to the start"). If you wanted to give this control to the user, implementation would largely depend on your system of addresses/coordinates. For Firebox, you hit tab, type in the address, and then enter. The portal then appears directly in front of you. If we're trying to avoid the keyboard, your system might would need some sort of map or database that could be pulled up easily.


i love the idea of users being in control of teleporting, especially the idea of being able to create a portal then walk through it. however for gaming experiences i can see some developers limiting this to only being able to portal back to places you have already visited (VR equivalent of fast travel).

on the flip side for serendipitous virtual world experience I would like to offer full control over teleporting to the user. I would prefer to do it all visually with just a mouse or gamepad no keyboard required. but if the keyboard is there and the user is comfortable with using it without being able to see it i have nothing against offer that functionality as well.

In truth I think assigning the menu to a button or gesture would work better than staring at the orb. The orb would either require an odd enough neck angle so that it is out of your way when you don't want it, or it would be easy to look at but would constantly get in the way and result in accidental menu opens. That's my thought, anyway.


good point. duly noted . yes i agree with mapping menus to a physical button especially when holding a controller with lots of buttons such as a gamepad. however when holding a mouse for instance you really only have two buttons. the action orbs was a means of getting around those kinds of limitations. i was thinking that action orbs would eliminate the need to use the keyboard entirely.

action orbs was mostly an after-thought though. i would still like to experiment with using them in some form or fashion. especially since with action orbs you can customize them.

orb themes:
-fairy
-eyebot
-sword
-pokemon
-et all

also i haven't even got around to thinking about and experimenting with HUDs yet..

from a design perspective i can see some very interesting GUI designs that leverage HUDs to make menus look sexy and non intrusive. in that menus would simply expand from and collapse back too the HUD... this would be idea especially when holding a gamepad with lots of face buttons.

should it be HUD? or in game menu like action orb? or perhaps both?

for now im leaning towards experimenting with both....

MiloSavage
Explorer
I think that the rift or any hmd is just a starting point. I agree with everything your saying and we do need standardization for just a rift and keyboard/ controller. Voice i think will play a big part if done well however i foresee VR hmd like the rift coming with gloves or wrist bands out of the box within the next 3 years. Gestures ( which will need thier own standardizations) are easy to learn and muscle memory cannot be under valued. They can be progressed from what we already do on touch screens. pulling a menu down from the top of your field of view with your hand and scrolling through it like a touch screen then pull your hand back to select. or have touching the tip of your thumb to the tip of each finger be a different 'key' like buttons on a controller.
Not so helpful for with just the rift now but more accessories will be in to high demand not to be made one the hmd is down packed and hand gestures seem like the most natural thing for navigation.

que Minority report and Iron Man 😄

cubytes
Protege
so much excitement and enthusiasm right now in this community. i dont know how i got myself so involved in this? i dont even have a DK1. honestly i have been working and gearing up to launch a start up for months now on a completely different project. now i am seriously considering dropping that project to do a start up working specifically on my concept of "revolving door".