Author: Nicolas Saavedra Rueda

While most designers have figured out their workflow for designing mobile apps, processes for designing VR interfaces are yet to be defined. When the first VR app design project came through our door, the logical first step was for us to devise a process.

Traditional workflows, new territory

Interface-based VR apps work according to the same basic dynamic as traditional apps: Users interact with an interface that helps them navigate pages. We’re simplifying here, but just keep this in mind for now.

Given the similarity to traditional apps, the tried-and-tested mobile app workflows that designers have spent years refining won’t go to waste and can be used to craft VR UIs.

1. Wireframes

Go through rapid iterations, defining the interactions and general layout.

2. Visual design

At this stage, the features and interactions have been approved. Brand guidelines are now applied to the wireframes, and a beautiful interface is crafted.

3. Blueprint

Here, we’ll organize screens into flows, drawing links between screens and describing the interactions for each screen. We call this the app’s blueprint, and it will be used as the main reference for developers working on the project.

Tools

Before we get started with the walkthrough, here are the tools we’ll need:

• Sketch. We’ll use Sketch to design our interfaces and user flows. If you don’t have it, you can download a trial version. The sketch is our preferred interface design software.
• GoPro VR Player. GoPro VR Player is a 360-degree content viewer. It’s provided by GoPro and is free. We’ll use it to preview our designs and test them in context.
• Oculus Rift. Hooking Oculus Rift into the GoPro VR Player will enable us to test the design in context.

“You can think of an environment as the world that you enter when you put on a VR headset”

Sam Applebee

Taking into consideration the VR or Virtual Reality is a technology that requires details for building it. The question of how the design for VR application works around came out. What does it need? Where it goes? What is the most important requirement?

Many questions where raise but, I still think that the essential question indeed is, what means design for VR?

Environments and Interfaces

Think about an environment as the world that you enter when you put on a VR headset — the virtual planet you find yourself on, or the view from the roller-coaster that you’re riding.

From the other side, an interface is the set of elements that users interact with to navigate an environment and control their experience. All VR apps can be positioned along two axes according to the complexity of these two components.

• In the top-left quadrant are things like simulators, such as the roller-coaster experience linked to above. These have a fully formed environment but no interface at all. You’re simply locked in for the ride.
• In the opposite quadrant are apps that have a developed interface but little or no environment. Samsung’s Gear VR home screen is a good example.

Designing virtual environments such as places and landscapes requires proficiency with 3D modelling tools, putting these elements out of reach for many designers. However, there’s a huge opportunity for UX and UI designers to apply their skills to designing user interfaces for virtual reality (or VR UIs, for short).

Virtual Reality has the possibilities to revolutionise the Healthcare

I am interested in the possibilities that virtual reality can bring into medicine. In the last years, VR has changed the healthcare industries. From developing new life-saving techniques to training the doctors of the future, VR has a multitude of applications for health and healthcare, from the clinical to the consumer.

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Virtual Reality has the ability to transport you inside the human body – to access & view areas that otherwise would be impossible to reach. Currently, medical students learn on cadavers, which are difficult to get hold of and (obviously) do not react in the same way a live patient would. 

In VR however, you can view minute detail of any part of the body in stunning 360° CGI reconstruction & create training scenarios which replicate common surgical procedures.

Medical Realities is one of the companies pioneering the use of Virtual Reality to deliver high-quality surgical training. They film real-life surgery in 4K 360° video from multiple angles which is then combined with CGI models of the anatomy being operated on to provide an immersive & interactive training experience.

Video Example

Articles

Virtual Reality for Health Care: a survey

Judi Moline

Embodied Labs

Carrie Shaw