VR Tour of a Medical Equipment Manufacturing Facility

What happened was…

A major medical parts manufacturer, asked us (Tipping Point Media) to create a VR experience that they can showcase at their trade booth. We had a quick turn around time (one month) from design, through development, to create a VR experience that showcased their manufacturing facility.

Requirements

Ability to view rooms in full 360º view
Ability to see points of interest and learn about the facility
Ability to choose a different room to explore
Instructions on how to navigate to the different rooms
Instructions on what to do when in the room
A way to exit a room and get back to the main menu

Wireframes

These were the initial wireframes that were created for our client. The ones below showcase the experience of selecting a scene, and jumping and the process one uses to navigate to that scene. One of the limitations we were faced with was, creating a virtual reality experience that was hands-free, because they wanted to utilize Google Cardboard.

Problem

How do you navigate a virtual world, without the use of your hands?

Solution

The view is broken into three panels. Center, left and right. This is to communicate that one is surrounded by scenes. There are three scenes in the center and another two, to the left and right of the user. The idea was to create a gallery of scenes.

Storyboards

When working with our client, one thing that we did, was sit down with them and create story boards. We wanted to create a narrative for the user and think through the chain of events in each screen. Here we think through how instructional info is presented and interactions.

We decided that we would use an aiming reticule, pictured below as a small circle on the screen, and you would aim it at the scene you wanted to experience. We thought that the boxes around the titles looked clunky, so we got rid of them.

One problem we had to solve for was: how do we prevent a user from loading into the scene that is right in front of them every time. One way around this, was to have the user look at the titles instead. In order to communicate this, we designed on-boarding to help communicate where to look

Scenes

Return to the Main Menu

Wireframes V2

We reintroduced the boxes around the titles. One thing that became apparent when we tested in the office is people did not know to look at the titles to load into a scene.

Loading into a scene

One UX pattern we also utilized is known as a fuse countdown. What this means is there is a visible progress bar, or count down that needs to occur, before a user is loaded into a scene. These are common in the video game industry. They are designed to assure that interactions are not considered jarring. Below, the title rectangle fills as the progress before a load happens. When testing, in the office, it was important to find the optimal speed. Too fast and things were jarring, too slow and things were boring. We found the optimal time to be between 3-5 seconds to be optimal.