6 User Interface Design for Virtual Reality
This chapter covers
- • Why user interface design for the Rift needs to be different from conventional UI
- • Ways to move conventional UI elements into VR
- • Guidelines for 3d scene and UI design
- • Input devices and VR UI design
Hallucinated any big, floating scoreboards lately?
It’s funny, but it’s true: if we showed you a picture of the world with lots of little floating squares full of words, with numbers and pictures inside funny-shaped symbols all hanging in front of your face (Figure 6.1) as though some street punk had come along and graffiti’d reality...
Figure 6.1 - Team Fortress 2 by Valve. The floating scoreboard somewhere in the space between you and your gun, the health and status readouts pinned to the corners of the screen, and the external 2D overlays are all user interface conventions which we take for granted in today’s computer-generated 3D environments.
...you’d be totally okay with it. You recognize that all this floating visual noise is the User Interface of the game, and you recognize the abstract symbols it employs. The big ‘plus’ symbol in the left-hand corner? Sure, that means health. And behind the pleasantly transparent popup, that’s your gun, rendered in 3D. 2D and 3D elements coexist on your screen, and that’s okay.