Book Excerpt: How Do I Actually Make VR?
This month we are releasing preview content from the forthcoming book “A Practical Guide to Making VR That Changes the World.”
First of all, ask this one question — how do I want someone to feel when they take the headset off? Do I want them to feel conflicted, as was the case with the child welfare piece mentioned in the intro? Do I want them to feel angry and frustrated, which was the goal of the workplace exclusion piece? Should they feel happy, sad, empowered, confident, unsure? No feeling is more or less “correct” than another, but a feeling and emotional center needs to drive every aspect of the content creation.
From there, you can focus on the skills you want a user to learn. If you want people to learn how to solve customer problems, for example, let them practice taking proactive actions to ask the right questions to get to the bottom of a situation. If you want to create a sense of empathy, let them experience a situation from their own perspective. If you want them to learn a routine task, have them practice.
And whatever you do, remember this — a few moments spent in VR cannot replace a lifetime of experience on the part of another person. There is a robust debate about whether putting on a VR headset allows someone to embody someone of another race or gender identity — but there is no way putting on a headset for ten minutes can make me forget that I’ve spent forty-one years as a white woman. The better move is to meet people where they are. Almost everyone brings some baggage to the table, and a good VR experience will make them relate to an experience from that perspective.
A few other practical considerations — think about where users will experience the piece, and make sure they feel psychologically safe when they are in headset. If you have a mixed gender-identifying audience, make sure you have female-identifying docents on hand to make sure those who identify as female feel safe when their senses are cut off. If anything in the piece could be triggering, warn users ahead of time. I once did a VR piece about sexual assault at a gallery and went in with no knowledge of the subject matter, and as a survivor, found the piece terrifying and triggering.
Consider your audience and their comfort level with technology in general. Are you building something for an audience that skews younger and male-identifying, and is familiar with game mechanics? You can likely make something that is a little more complicated in terms of interactions and gameplay. A broader audience? Make sure everyone can use it. Nothing is worse than feeling stupid in a VR piece because it was poorly designed. If you need to tell people to “click this, now click that, now teleport here, now toggle this”…sorry, you’ve failed as a creator.
