Teaching Input Paradigms in VR

Everyone expects cool things from VR. Give us experiences where we are spell casting wizards, astronauts in space stations and cowboys in badlands, our players tell us. When I was at Oculus, Brendan Iribe used to say our mission was let users be anyone, anywhere at anytime.

Well guess what, wizards, astronauts and cowboys interact with the world in very different ways! They have very different verbs. In order to truly fulfill the carnal fantasy of being these characters, we need to tutorialize players into different input paradigms. This is tricky for several reasons:

1. Novelty – VR input controllers are still in their first generation. This means even the basic tactile elements like where buttons are, takes some getting used to.
2. Lack of Input Standardization – The Oculus Touch Controller, HTC Vive Controllers and PS Move are all very different. Additionally, somehow we need to make you feel like a wizard, a cowboy and an astronaut all with the same input device!
3. The Uncanny Valley – No one complains that pressing the X button doesn’t “really feel” like jumping. That’s because the experience is 2 degrees removed from the player. The player presses keys on a controller that affects pixels on a screen. In VR there is a 1:1 real time mapping between your virtual and real world hands. This level of immersion greatly enhances player expectation. With great power comes great responsibility!

However, for a player to enter flow state, a critical requirement is that the tools at her disposal simply seep into her subconscience. When you are playing Destiny, you aren’t thinking about where your finger needs to move to fire or fly. You just do it.

So clearly, there is a tension between creating engaging “game like” experiences that make the player feel competent while also fulfilling the fantasy of “being” that character. The sooner this tension is realized, the better your experience will be. There are many ways one might go about resolving this tension:

1. Bottom Up Approach – We need to start conceiving VR experiences from the ground up, i.e., thinking about interactions first and experience next.
2. Subvert Player Expectation using Affordances - The experience I’m currently working on at PlayStation, is about painting. However, in our case the player’s hands are a brush and a palette. She isn’t holding those objects in her hands, her hands are the objects themselves. As simple as it sounds, this has powerful effects:
• By making her hands disappear the experience tells the player what she can and cannot do in the world.
• It avoids simulation fatigue. Things that may seem engaging to do once or twice quickly lose their novelty. Explicitly turning doorknobs to open a door is a good example of an activity that is subject to simulation fatigue.
3. Extrapolate Player Input - Players care more about having a great experience and feeling powerful than they are about having an experience where they are fully in control. For this reason, in our painting project we give the player template brushes instead of an actual palette. For example, the player gets a tree brush, a sun brush etc. Additionally, the tree brush doesn’t draw a tree in the exact shape the player traces her hand. It instead collects points across her hand movement and constructs an elegant spline that looks beautiful. This makes the player feel powerful with minimal skill or effort. Instead of testing the player’s painting skills, the core engagement derives from expressivity. All these decisions were made after a bottom up testing of the central interaction.
4. Recontextualize Player Verbs – It is important to recognize the shelf life of an interaction. How long can it stay juicy? This becomes a particularly important when an experience is not necessarily about a progression in skill. This tends to be true about most VR experiences for several reasons:
• They tend to be short due to production budgets. Furthermore, greater iteration time is needed to “find the fun” because the medium is so new.
• They tend to be narrative focused because the medium is so experiential.
• Most interaction systems are still hard to master in VR.

For these reasons, you may feel a need to add different types of interactions to your world. This however, comes with the added burden of tutorializing another input paradigm. Instead you can recontextualize the existing verb. This simply means using the same input to produce different effects. For example, in our experience we were faced with the desire to progress from 2D painting to 3D painting. Instead of implementing a new input mechanism for 3D painting, we have the player paint on a canvas which in turn produces 3D objects.