Design for Virtual Reality

If you have been following any blog or news site related to technology you probably read about virtual reality at least once or twice. Virtual reality is bringing about a kind of “silent revolution”, as it has great potential and is receiving a lot of attention from companies based around the gaming world (computer hardware manufacturers, vr headset for PC, game developers, vr headset, that kind of stuff) while not so much from the mainstream.

The thing is, the technology has been gaining traction for the last two decades and is becoming cheap very quickly. Seriously, you can easily find a VR headset compatible with your smartphone for less than $50, and they come with a controller and all that. It is not a fancy Oculus Rift or Valve Index, but they get the job done.

What does that mean exactly?

It means flat screens are slowly becoming a thing of the past. Virtual Reality Cyprus headsets offer a much more immersive experience for the users, so it is unsurprising that it quickly entered the gaming niches. But the fact that they are slowly becoming more popular among the average customer means that soon every household will have at least one of them.

Currently they are mostly a gimmick and a source of curiosity (meaning people are going after them just to know what they like). Most people will try one and quickly become bored, because there isn’t much to do really (unless you are gamer). You will try some phone apps and then throw it in the attic until you find another use for it.

But it is exactly this curiosity and access to the technology that is bound to make it a feature of every household and make more people design software around it. And in turn, Virtual Reality Cyprus will with every year become more and more used every day.

So that raises the question: will you be ready for it?

The UX Revolution

Virtual reality gives the possibility to make more immersive and dynamic content than ever. Instead of just looking at a flat screen, we are now peering into a completely virtual world, which we can shape in any way we want.

Although this may seem a bit too abstract and “open” to you, there are some companies that are already experimenting with those new possibilities. Steam, the most used game distribution service for PC, is a part of the experiments in VR thanks to its creator, Valve, being one of the technology’s main investors.

SteamVR, the VR version of Steam, comes with its very own SteamVR Home, which serves as a “second home” for its user. It is basically a more interactive version of the Steam library, as you are able to customize its shape, furniture, scenery, items, put your screenshots on the walls as if they were paintings, and place “game trophies” around, which enable you to jump into a VR game from it and change user experience revolution in appearance according to the number of achievements you earned in a game.

It may not take long for the concept of a “VR home” to entirely replace the traditional “desktop” screens of our computers, whose customization was mostly limited to changing wallpapers, screensavers, and UI colors.

What will happen to the Internet?

Did you know that Oculus VR, the company which made the pioneer VR headset, Oculus Rift, was bought by Facebook some years ago? It would not be surprising if the social media company was already looking into making some kind of “Facebook VR” in order to “merge” both of its user bases. They are currently working on something like that called “Facebook Horizon”, although it looks more like a social sandbox game than a VR social media.

The widespread adoption of “VR homes” would probably be one of the last steps in the transition to a VR-only world. Before that, we could easily see desktop applications, web browsers and web sites adopting and experimenting with this new technology.

It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that Google is already experimenting with that too, considering all their investments both in web technology and experimental hardware, such as the long-dead Google Glass.

So, are you prepared for this future? Do you already have any idea of how it may look like? How about making it look like the way you want it to be? This entire area of UI and UX design is open for grabs. It just needs the right idea to make it go forward.