John Carmack's Latency Mitigation Strategies
October 25, 2014Recovering this great post
This is Twenty Milliseconds, a site documenting what works and what doesn't in virtual reality design.
This is Twenty Milliseconds, a site documenting what works and what doesn't in virtual reality design.
This is Twenty Milliseconds, a site documenting what works and what doesn't in virtual reality design.
Do you look at the keys when you type, or can you type without looking? Help me figure out the answer to this question.
Allow users to re-center the application to their resting head position before placing them in a virtual world. Users should be able to press any key to re-center the display. If a scene is visible on-screen, fade it out and then fade it in in the recentered position.
Recording a user's movements while they are wearing an Oculus Rift is trickier than recording a laptop or phone screen. However, there are some tools which facilitate easy recording.
Advertisers have much more space to work with in virtual reality than they do on mobile phones, which should allow for a wide range of advertisements. Many antipatterns can be deployed to catch a user's eye, and some of these will make them sick. Designers and advertisers should strive to create unobtrusive ads that fit in a virtual space.
Having players select items by looking at them is simple to code and works on all machines. Designers should provide visual feedback to indicate that you're supposed to look at items to select them, and require a button press to select the target.
It's difficult to avoid sickness with a moving camera, but Playful did it by compressing the camera's range of motion, focusing the user's attention on a single point, and experimenting with all types of designs.
Headphones are preferable to speakers because they can simulate sound in all directions, block out sound from external sources, and work better with top-of-the-line audio algorithms.
Live blogging this talk from Oculus Connect
Placing your user in a cockpit can help reduce acceleration-related sickness.
You can't trust users to tell you when they are feeling sick.
We're going to be stuck with a huge menu of options for a while.
Who gets affected, what the symptoms are, and more.
With a headset you can track opponents in 3D, making radar tracking UI finally feasible.
Developers need to think about every single screen in their application.
Two developers have ideas for how to select one option from hundreds.
A stereoscopic viewpoint adds an extra dimension for data visualizations, and the ability to see more by moving your head means designers have much more space to address when creating graphs.
Looking down at a body that does not resemble your own can be quite a shock. Here are some strategies you can use to mitigate this.
It's different (and grander) than the setup at your desk.
Porting games from other platforms will be difficult because many popular gameplay elements would cause disorientation in a VR headset.
High ratings, high comfort levels, and high download numbers go hand in hand. At the high end of PC performance, frame rates don't affect application rating.
Users experience motion sickness when their avatar collides with an in-game object. Consider blacking the screen for permanent objects, or allowing transparent pass-through if it makes sense for your application.
Take part in a 30 minute user test, get 30 minutes of free activity with an Oculus Rift.
Early mobile development was characterized by poor usability and applications ill suited for mobile devices. This phenomenon is likely to reoccur with VR development.
When wearing a headset, there's no reason your target should be aimed the same direction that your head is facing.
A simple metric can be used to reliably assess motion sickness across users of your application, and used to compare motion sickness specific to your application with general sickness from using VR systems.
Applications that do not follow VR best practices will make users nauseous or worse. Applications must be responsive to head movements at all times, avoid unrealistic movement of the world, and render the world with extremely low latency.
What works and what doesn't in VR interface design
© Kevin Burke, 2014