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Tag: vr

Virtual Currency Experimentation

The Metaverse’s Unique Approach to Content Design

August 3, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I last blogged about User eXperience (UX) Writing and Design in 2021, and since then I've taken my design skills into another dimension--literally. As a Senior Content Designer on Meta's Horizon Worlds, I collaborated with a talented team of visual designers, gameplay experts, audio specialists, and researchers to help build both a framework for a user-created metaverse, as well as individual worlds (essentially apps and games within Horizon Worlds), designed to boost user engagement and satisfaction.

Horizon Central

As the Senior Content Designer for Horizon Central, I helped build this new world that serves as a central hub for both newcomers and frequent visitors to the metaverse.

Horizon Central aims to act as a central location where you can meet up with friends and strangers, and as a showcase for some of the best content in Horizon Worlds.

I collaborated with a talented team made up of product and game designers, 3D visual artist, and audio engineers to define, refine, and built this central hub for Horizon Worlds that significantly increased retention, repeat visits, and exploration of Horizon Worlds.

Among the features and goals of Horizon Central:

  • Highlight compelling worlds and video events
  • Teach users how to perform social interactions, such as adding followers and creating parties
  • Educate about the core loop quest-and-reward system, which awards avatar items, emotes, and stickers to those who complete quests
  • Support seasonal refreshes to introduce new features and highlighted events, such as updated rewards systems and concerts by artists like Sabrina Carpenter

Among the areas where I played a key role as the content designer for the space are:

  • Naming: Not just the world, but coming up with evocative and fun names for locations such as "Cosplay Cabana" (avatar clothing accessories shop) and Triumphs and Treasures (quests and rewards center). Horizon Central needs to feel like a real, fun place.
  • Quests and Rewards: Designed core-loop activities that serve both educational and retention purposes
  • Seasonal Events: Collaborating with game design to develop, evaluate, and enhance interactive elements and quests that promote exploration and encourage repeated engagement.
  • Designing Virtual Spaces: The creation of our inaugural shop, where items can be purchased with virtual currency, necessitated not only experimentation with novel labeling techniques and item previews but also an analysis of how users would navigate the space—mirroring the considerations designers make for brick-and-mortar stores.

Horizon Central stands out as the sole world in Horizon Worlds with a dedicated link in the user interface, making it the most prominent world in the platform. It was a privilege to contribute to its design and launch, as well as to its ongoing enhancements that continue to make it more engaging.

Meta Connect 2023: Setting the Stage for Mark Zuckerberg

Meta Connect is an annual event that serves as both a developer's conference and a platform for introducing new products. With 2023's introduction of the Quest 3 headset and Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, this was a significant year, and to make a splash we created a virtual replica of the Meta campus within Horizon Worlds.

Visitors could explore the Events building to see models of the new Quest 3 and Ray-Ban products and read their specs, but we aimed to make the experience more engaging. We designed the world to highlight the latest features of Horizon Worlds, including a quest-and-rewards system, new graphic meshes, and portals to the metaverse's most impressive gaming destinations.

Drawing on my experience with the Core Loop team's engagement strategies, I collaborated with gameplay and graphics designers to develop a series of quests. These quests rewarded attendees with unique prizes, such as an avatar shirt featuring a Meta Connect attendee badge.

Taking advantage of the immersive, embodied environment, we minimized text and instructions, opting instead for quests indicated by symbols, interactive objects, and other intuitive cues.

We not only had record attendance for the live keynote by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta Reality Labs leadership, but also an unprecedented completion rate for the reward quests, with many attendees proudly displaying their hard-won custom Connect swag throughout Horizon Worlds.

Horizon Central Core Loop

One way to keep users returning to an app or game is by engaging them with an appealing "core loop," a reward system that motivates them to complete tasks to earn and upgrade items. In Horizon Worlds, we developed a series of quests that unlock new items, such as avatar outfits and interactive emojis.

The quests encouraged users to interact with others, aligning with the metaverse’s role as a synchronous social network. Users were rewarded for gaining new followers, giving gifts, and exploring Horizon Central and other key worlds.

The initial quest/reward loops led to a significant increase in engagement and return visits, prompting us to expand the scope for even greater appeal and retention. We introduced seasonal events with limited-time quests, drawing users into Spring- and Summer-themed worlds and rewarding them for attending events like concerts by Sabrina Carpenter and Alesso.

Originally, rewards were tied to specific quests. However, with the launch of the Summer Carnival, we began testing a virtual currency system. This system awarded time-limited tickets for completing quests, which could be exchanged for rewards of the user’s choice. This approach allows users to focus on the quests they find most enjoyable and choose the prizes that appeal to them, rather than completing less appealing quests just to unlock a coveted reward. There hasn't been a metaverse-wide virtual currency available in Horizon Worlds, so if this initial test is a success it could become the foundation for a virtual economy that world creators can participate in.

As the senior content designer on the project, I've been involved in every aspect of our quest/reward core loop: setting standards for quest titles and content, crafting specific quests, designing rewards, and incorporating A/B test results and user feedback to update the user interface to reduce friction.

 

Applying VR/AR/MR Content Design to Traditional Content

My earlier work on digital retailing and entertainment for the Xbox console required a different approach than traditional web design. The audience interacts using a controller, views the content from 10 feet away, and desires simple, one-click interactions. The fewer steps between a decision and the ability to purchase a game or view content, the higher the customer satisfaction, and the greater the percentage of users who follow through to task completion.

Creating compelling content for VR (virtual reality), MR (mixed reality), and AR (augmented reality) demands a new approach as well. When wearing VR or MR goggles, users interact with a three-dimensional, immersive world. Whether they’re in a fantastical realm or their own living room, there’s no reason to present them with a wall of text and a series of buttons. Instead, you can make real-world objects glow, add switches and physical buttons, or even have an adorable AI cat or puppy mascot accompany them to answer questions. By guiding and training visitors with a combination of visuals, 3D audio cues, and voice, you can bring a new level of delight and simplicity to the experience.

Horizon Worlds is what they call a "zero to one" product: It's a brand new kind of experience, and because of this, there are few established design standards to follow. It's not a matter of asking "how do designers do this thing?" Instead, a content designer considers the goal, the experience, and the space it's taking place in, and looks for the best way to do it. Is that a traditional, easily dismissed dialog, or something in the virtual room? Text, audio, video, AI characters, visual path wayfinding guidance, highlighting real-world objects... There are so many ways to convey a message, and the goal is to find a balance of delight, simplicity, efficiency, and localizability.

The metaverse doesn't exist yet, but Horizon Worlds is a toolkit that introduces the concept and gives creators a toolkit they can user to explore it. To those experienced with cutting-edge games, Horizon Worlds can feel shockingly rudimentary, but behind the often retro-feeling visuals are some delightful and fascinating new approaches to interacting with users. Having explored Horizon Worlds and competing products and seen the kind of MR and AR technologies that are just a few years down the road, I'm convinced that metaversal technology has the potential to completely redefine how content designers communicate with customers.

For now, though, products like web pages, streaming media service browsers, and voice assistants lack the three-dimensional advantages of embodied technologies like VR, MR, and AR. But designing for a zero-to-one product, where users explore a three-dimensional space, opens up new possibilities for content design. It challenges designers to rethink traditional mental models, find new, intuitive ways to solve problems, and reject “that’s how it’s done” as a guideline.

 

Oculus Rift S – Quick Hands-On

May 21, 2019 / / 0 Comments

This is a quick hands-on impression of the Oculus Rift S from the view of a flight sim player. It's not a full review (plenty of those around) and it's focused on the rather niche category of flight simulations, which is where the Rift S turns out to really prove it's worthwhile.

Despite the lukewarm reviews and the minor upgrades in specs, Matt Wagner's commentary on the Rift S's clarity in DCS made me order it from Amazon (where I could return it easily if not impressed).

I'm *not* returning it. Spent the evening flying flight sims in it and it's clearly a worthwhile upgrade for sim fans. You would think it had much higher resolution than the original (CV1) Oculus Rift, given the additional clarity. The screen door effect (visible pixels) is just *gone*. (At least, for my eyes.)

Some impressions trying various flight simulators:

  • Prepar3D v4.51 probably sees the most significant improvement, with instruments just dramatically easier to read. Everything looks sharper as well.
  • Matt Wagner wasn't kidding about DCS. The view from the F-86 Sabre cockpit was just amazingly sharp.
  • IL-2 Battle of Moscow/Bodenplatte/etc is by far the best looking of them all. With no screen door effect and the efficient VR engine, the visuals are just stunning. Flew the P-47D around and was blown away.
  • Also tried FlyInside Flight Simulator, and while that one's in very early access, it worked and looked great.
  • I haven't tried X-Plane 11 or AeroFly FS2 yet, but I have no doubt they'll be awesome given all the other sims.

A quick game of Beat Sabre showed the controller tracking to be as good in that game as with the OG Rift with three sensors spread around the room -- it never lost tracking.

Random notes:

  • The 80Hz vs 90Hz refresh rate difference from the original Rift isn't noticeable
  • I was thinking I’d need to use headphones since they dropped the earphones and added tiny speakers near your ear. But the audio is surprisingly clear from these, and it’s nice to be able to hear sounds in the room if someone comes in. This was maybe the biggest pleasant surprise. I wouldn’t use them for music (no bass) or watching movies, but it’s fine for flight sims.
  • The internal tracking on the controllers works well
  • Soooo much easier to set up than the original Rift or the Vive without all the tracking stations
  • You now define the room by laser-drawing the border with the controllers instead of having to walk around in view of cameras, much easier
  • Even with three cameras, the original Rift would sometimes lose track of tracking and I'd find my head sticking out the top of a cockpit, down by the rudder pedals, or on a wing, and have to re-set the VR view. Didn't happen once with the Rift S.
  • Unlike some of the professional reviewers, I actually like the new headband better than the original Rift’s. Easier to adjust for different users.
  • My one negative so far? There isn’t the big gap around your nose that I used to peek down through on the OG Rift to view the keyboard when playing sims. I’ve had to lift the headset a few times to find a key.

Answering Some Questions

I posted an earlier version of this on a couple of simulation and gaming forums, and some questions came up. Here are the answers:

  • Field of view is supposed to be slightly better than the original Rift, but I couldn't see a difference.
  • Because the new screen is LCD based instead of OLED, the blacks aren't going to be as... black. But flying around in Prepar3D and IL-2 at night, the night sky and scenery looked about the same as it does on a monitor -- it's not washed out or gray.
  • Oculus Tray Tool (and everything else I tried) works fine. I used it to set P3D to a supersampling rate of 1.5 and it looked super-sharp.

If you're playing action-based VR games, games with cartoony graphics, or really anything outside of vehicle simulations, I'm not sure the improvements in the Rift S would justify an upgrade from the original Oculus Rift CV1. But for flight sims, the Rift S awesome and I have zero regrets on the money spent.

I had an HP Reverb on order as well, thinking the increased resolution would be a big benefit in sims. But I just cancelled that order, because the Rift S is so sharp I'm quite satisfied, and the Oculus solution is going to have much better frame rates than the Reverb's higher resolution will afford.

I don't know what the cancelled "Rift 2" was going to be, but the S might as well stand for "Sim edition" and it's a nice upgrade for my usage scenario.

(If you decide to buy one and use this Amazon link, I'll get a couple of bucks in Amazon credit, which would be cool and appreciated.)

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