Directions for 3D User Interface Research from Consumer VR Games

TL;DR

This paper reviews novel 3D user interface design patterns emerging from consumer VR games, highlighting their potential for broad reuse and research, and providing a curated, crowd-sourced repository for future exploration.

Contribution

It introduces a curated collection of innovative 3DUI design patterns from consumer VR, emphasizing their novelty and research relevance.

Findings

Identified highly novel 3DUI patterns from consumer VR games

Created a crowd-sourced repository of design patterns

Highlighted potential for broad re-use and further research

Abstract

With the continuing development of affordable immersive virtual reality (VR) systems, there is now a growing market for consumer content. The current form of consumer systems is not dissimilar to the lab-based VR systems of the past 30 years: the primary input mechanism is a head-tracked display and one or two tracked hands with buttons and joysticks on hand-held controllers. Over those 30 years, a very diverse academic literature has emerged that covers design and ergonomics of 3D user interfaces (3DUIs). However, the growing consumer market has engaged a very broad range of creatives that have built a very diverse set of designs. Sometimes these designs adopt findings from the academic literature, but other times they experiment with completely novel or counter-intuitive mechanisms. In this paper and its online adjunct, we report on novel 3DUI design patterns that are interesting from both design and research perspectives: they are highly novel, potentially broadly re-usable and/or suggest interesting avenues for evaluation. The supplemental material, which is a living document, is a crowd-sourced repository of interesting patterns. This paper is a curated snapshot of those patterns that were considered to be the most fruitful for further elaboration.