MagixHome Mobile VR: Input Prototyping

Brief
I was a VR prototyping intern with SkyOpt, creator of the MagixHome VR interior design experience. With the release of the GearVR and the 3DoF controller, I was tasked to explore the potential of the platform for MagixHome VR.

Year
2017

Tools
Unity, C#, GearVR with Controller

Input Mechanics

3 Degree-of-Freedom Input Controller
With only 3DoF, accelerometer and limited mechanical inputs, there is a need to re-scope key interactions required and rethink user actions performable in mobile VR, to maintain an intuitive experience.

User Journey Concept

Action Mapping

Central Interaction - Raycaster
As both mobile VR headset and mobile VR controller are 3 degree-of-freedom, it is designed for users to be stationary. Hence, the standard mode of navigation and selection - teleportation and selection via raycast is adopted. All other interaction mechanics are designed around this core feature.

Holding Trigger to teleport with furniture selected

When integrating a key feature ‘teleporting with a furniture selected’, the raycast was already in use for repositioning the furniture. There was a need to switch the mode of raycast. Holding down the trigger button imitates a grab hold, and the furniture becomes minimised, floating above the users controller, as though the user is grabbing it. The raycast then switches to the teleport raycast. On release of the trigger, the funiture is ‘released’ and raycast switches back to furniture repositioning raycast.

This was tested against several alternative interactions, including using circular pad button instead of trigger button, and using trigger button as a toggle. As the final method mapped to a physical human action of ‘grabbing’, it was the most intuitive and preferred by the user testers.

User Tests
Unsupervised user tests were performed to see if the onboarding and the general user interactions were intuitive to adopt without external guidance. All users were able to intuitively grasp controls without guidance, and rated the interactions to be highly intuitive. This proves that mobile VR can be an effective platform for such an experience. Additionally, users requested for more complex features, such as rotation locking. With this Proof-of-Concept, further feature definition can be derived to create a MVP.

For more details, contact me at mail@alanng.me for more details.