Make: Volume 52

them how to hand it to someone else or

throw it across the room, and you’ve set up

the opportunity to layer on more advanced

tasks, like sorting many objects, hiding

them, or even shrinking or enlarging them.

For VR developers, the downside of giving

your users hands is that the users expect VR

environments to be more interactive than a

traditional game. When we populated our

test world with some small props, the first

thing people tried to do was pick them up.

When we let people pick those objects up,

they tried to throw them. When we let them

throw them, they expected them to bounce

and interact with other objects. We wouldn’t

have figured out that people expected all

this, but luckily, we ...

TEST EARLY AND TEST OFTEN

Remember when I said I’ve run a few

hundred people through our VR demos?

That wasn’t just for fun. Every time we

showed someone new what we’d built, we

used that as an opportunity to get feedback

on our software. It’s good to set up so you

can see both the user and the monitor with

what they’re seeing on it.

Sessions in VR can be long, and I don’t

like to interrupt anyone to ask questions

when they’re in the goggles, so it’s really

important that you take good notes as you

watch the tester. This lets you prompt your

testers with specifics about their experience

once they’ve taken the goggles off.

The big takeaway here is that everyone

reacts differently to different experiences

in VR, so get as many people to try your

software as you can. And above all …

DON’T MAKE PEOPLE SICK

Our number one rule is: Avoid making

people sick, at all costs. Yes, the alcohol and

theme park industries have made bank by

making their customers hurl, but I don’t

ever want to be responsible for ruining

someone’s day. Because VR software has

such an intimate connection to your user’s

brain — it takes over two senses entirely

— developers have a greater responsibility

than with most traditional software or

games. I’m not suggesting that there’s any

Lawnmower Man-style reprogramming

possible with VR, but bad or malicious

software definitely can make users feel

extremely uncomfortable.

When most people sense a disconnect

between the movement they see and the

movement (or lack thereof) they detect with

their inner ear, they start feeling motion

sickness. That discomfort builds the longer

you stay in the headset — the only way to get

a reprieve is to take a break.

The good news is that VR-related motion

sickness is avoidable for almost everyone. As

a developer, it’s your responsibility to ensure

your application never sags below the target

frame rate for your platform and to avoid

moving the player’s camera in ways that will

make them feel ill. To be safe, we never take

control of the camera from the user.

Every question about VR we answer just

begs another dozen questions. Many of

the lessons we’ve learned from decades of

traditional software development don’t

apply to VR, so we need people who are

excited about the possibility and ready to

create new solutions to problems we haven’t

even imagined yet. If you’d like to know

more, we regularly share our findings at

foovr.com/blog.

If you’d like to check out what we’ve

built, search for The FOO Show on your VR

headset’s storefront, we’re on Oculus and

Vive right now, and may be on Gear VR and

PlayStation VR by the time you read this.

FOO VR

Eric Florenzano

makershed.com40

Special Section

VR/AR | FOO VR and CD Case Hologram

Watching a hundred people figure out how to grab

things gave much-needed insight into designing a

way to pick up objects that makes sense to most

users. Even simple tasks are complex in VR.

For The FOO Show’s pilot, recording three

participants together meant squeezing everyone,

along with three gaming PCs and three Vives, into

a tight 20'×20' space.

Using VR, Smith was able to interview the people

behind the game Firewatch inside their creation,

something never before done. More importantly,

viewers at home could step inside too.

Many people had trouble understanding the talk

show concept, so Smith and team mocked up an

episode where he interviewed himself about his

new company. “It turns out interviewing yourself is

tough,” he says.

M52_038-40_SSfoo_F1.indd 40 6/12/16 4:37 PM