Have you ever considered that it might take toy rockets, butterflies, and dancing robots to transform your creative career?
I was a VR skeptic for two decades
When I heard about the Oculus VR headset Kickstarter in 2014, I was indifferent.
Six years later, I am evangelising about VR.
How did that happen?
Photo by Wesley Carvalho from Pexels
You might have a career where you have been designing and creating content for various different platforms and technologies over the last couple of years or even decades like myself.
Personally, I have moved through web design to game design and mobile app design and back.
Each of these design domains has had their particularities, and I have practiced each during specific moments in time - from the first-generation HTML in the 1990s via SMS flows on mobile to game design for early mobile handsets, to mouse and keyboard, and then to touch screens.
No matter how different each of these have been in their significant details - which always matter for design - they have focused on rectangular screens of various proportions, and privileged capturing attention on a two-dimensional surface, and asking users for slight moves of the wrist, taps of a button, or fiddling with thumb and index fingers, at best.
You might be skeptical - I was too
At some point in the 1990s, while studying at the university, I got a chance to try an early Sony headset, Glasstron, which was supposed to be “a walkman for the eyes”. It had one specific game, MechWarrior 2, which was tailored for the device. It was a sickening disappointment. I wanted to take the thing off after 10 seconds or so, and so would have you.
Never mind how much at the time I was into cyberpunk fiction, that experience left me scarred and a VR skeptic for two decades. Virtual Reality was a fever dream, and it would not mature until 2050, I thought, and even if it did - who cares.
It’s a cliche, but you have to experience VR yourself
When I heard about the Oculus Kickstarter in 2014, I was indifferent. Nevertheless, shortly after Oculus Rift launched in 2016, I got a chance to set it up and try the onboarding demo with the robot that reminds you of Wall-E.
Given my experiences of designing interactions for flat screens, that experience completely recaptured my imagination about the possibilities of immersive technologies.
In the demo, you get to release toy rockets and touch pixel butterflies:
It took rockets and butterflies to broke through the neural paths that decades of flat-screen work had burned into my brain. I have never been the same since for which I am thankful.
For you today in 2020, I hope the dancing robot with the Quest headset might just do the same!
Next steps: Hands-on with design and development
A bit later, the momentum towards VR I had gathered was given another bump by accessing The Lab, another fantastic playground showcasing 360-degree, spatial interaction potentials.
It inspired me into enrolling in Udacity’s VR Developer Nanodegree course a couple of years ago (sadly the complete course does not seem to exist anymore). When I was working as a game designer, I suffered a bit from imposter syndrome in not having the skills to program things into functional form.
After many failed tries, it was my enthusiasm for VR that finally got me over the hump. Today, I’m certainly not a programmer by trade, but I can do enough in Unity and C# to make my ideas come alive - and with resilience, one day I will release something of my own. And so can you.
In case you are inspired about the potential of VR and AR, my newsletter Design Superpowers! is here to help you get into making things. Subscribe and you’ll receive tutorials, book summaries, and more directly into your inbox!