Design for Presence in VR, Part 2: Towards An Applied Model
Please check out Part 1: Introduction and Part 3: Case Studies as well.
Categories of Presence
There are relatively few takes on how to break presence down to its component parts. Those interested, please look for Nathan Chertoff’s groundwork on summarising presence theories.
Kent Bye, the host of the excellent Voices of VR podcast, has introduced his Elemental Theory of Presence, building e.g. on Chertoff’s work, with a design point of view. (For a summary, have a look at his keynote talk from 09:00 onwards.)
I have found Bye’s four-fold categorisation useful and taken it into practice in e.g. inspiring game design students to think about VR concepts.
Consequently, I use the four categories as the premise for my design model. However, the categories are a quite high level, and therefore while they function well for blue-sky brainstorming, they do not provide enough detail for more deliberate design considerations. Bye’s analysis of a number of VR titles using the framework is also insightful, but I believe structured design thinking benefits from yet more detail and more precise distinctions between design elements with different functions: such as goals set for the user (mostly applicable to game design), social interactions, and/or physical interactions, to name a few.
To achieve that, one needs to start identifying low-level design patterns and solutions that not only label design aspects but also point at specific design solutions. The logic is that these lower-level patterns are ones that contribute to the type of presence categories they reside under and are detailed enough to inspire actual designs that execute towards specific combinations of presence. To point to this direction, I will discuss practical design case studies in Part 3.
Process
The research process for the model has been and continues to be, highly iterative. While playing and analysing individual VR games, specific design decisions in them have informed the model, while every once in a while, I have had to pull back and try to see the forest for the trees and synthesise general categories out of the individual examples with similarities with each other. This iteration and negotiation with the chicken-egg dilemma are still ongoing.
The model does not present an objective truth regarding the current VR design space and its complexities — rather, synthesising the model has been a creative exercise in itself.
Therefore, you might disagree with where a particular category or design pattern resides, but that is meant to work for the benefit of the model: If it manages to inspire critical thinking around VR design, beyond established guidelines having to do with ergonomics, haptics, and similar more technical aspects, I consider the model a success.
The Structure: Heart, Sectors, and Layers
The thinking behind the model has been organised into its circular visual form. The heart of the concentric circles presents the more abstract, high-level categories from Kent Bye’s theory. Towards the peripheries, you see sectors and layers, which point to the more specific design patterns and solutions that contribute to the type of presence they are housed under.
Three layers
So, while the level of abstraction decreases from the centre to the periphery, there are three layers that serve different dimensions in design:
- The higher level motivational layer in the heart of the model, which represents user motivations on engaging with a VR experience, followed
- by the physical layer, which houses the physical means of interaction given to the player, such as ‘verbs’ that they can interact with things in the app.
- Finally, at the very edges, the design becomes about the ways and means users engage with VR on so-called cognitive and sensorimotor levels, including such things as processes having to do with perception, reasoning, and haptics.
Closer Look: Motivational layer
One step down to more specificity from the four high-level categories, we find twelve subcategories, three per top category. As the picture above shows, the subcategories are, at this point, largely hypotheses based on my analysis of what influences a specific type of presence.
Further research might seek to validate them, but nevertheless they serve a starting point for dissecting VR user motivations. For example, designing means for users to nonverbally communicate in a VR application supports social presence, which can be a deliberate design goal.
Sectors
The sectors are the beef of the model, but also the ones that are currently in constant flux and inherently, will be re-evaluated as new, creative design solutions emerge. Nevertheless, the structure of the model is what enables this kind of iteration and also, as I hope, will enable other VR designers to look at their designs through the framework the model provides.
Let’s look at one sector more closely through the iteration.
Example: Sector for Social and Mental Presence
Many of the design patterns documented into the sector snapshot on the left are not VR specific, but ones that apply as well to games and, e.g., mobile apps where social is the focus.
Therefore, pinpointing the ones unique to VR become important: For example, thanks to presence, social proximity to other players or characters, and how that is implemented, is uniquely powerful (and also challenging) in VR. Also, observing facial expressions or emojis of avatars becomes more amplified through presence, and also contributes to the Embodied presence category.
Tellingly, at Oculus Connect 4, Facebook announced that its VR avatars would gain speech synchronisation, skin shading and eyes tracking. Also at the time of writing, it was recently announced that Rockstar will release the detective game L.A. Noire for VR, and it will be very exciting to see how the game’s mechanics of observing suspects’ micro-emotions have been re-purposed for VR and how they affect the experience.
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Overview
To give an example of how individual VR application can be used to exemplify a category, please see the picture below. While applications most of the time do occupy multiple sectors of presence, the enables us to place specific design aspects into specific sectors and to think about under which categories of presence an app’s design choices predominantly reside.
For instance, in the image on the left, you see Job Simulator next to the sub-sector titled ‘physical manipulation of objects’. This is largely what the game’s mechanics are about, yet actually a more close analysis of Job Simulator would reveal that it addresses aspects of presence in all quadrants. This might explain partially its success, but it is also important to underline how polished a game Job Simulator is. I want to make this remark to highlight the fact that while the model I propose here enables to map a deliberate set of design solutions for aiming towards a particular VR experience, this work amounts to nothing unless tons of attention to detail and iteration are spent in execution.
Other examples to pick out include Gorn, a highly physical gladiator game, which centers around a gory active presence, VR Sports Challenge, where the player becomes to embody an athlete in a variety of sports, I Expect You to Die, where the setting has subtle world-building elements in getting our imagination working around the agent theme while manipulating objects and deducing their behaviour, much like in Job Simulator. Finally, social VR apps like AltspaceVR obviously have drawn from a number of design solutions that support users’ experiences of social presence, including proximity to other users, and both verbal and non-verbal communication.
Thanks for reading! In Part 3: Case Studies, I will put the model into further practice by comparing two VR games’ design and talk about how individual sectors can be used as design drivers. More about Palace of Presence as well.
