AUDIENCE: Woo!

ROB JAGNOW: Woo!

I did not expect that a talk on process

would fill a room with a capacity of 300

with a line of people waiting outside.

I am Rob.

I hope you've been enjoying the VR sessions at Google

I/O. Together with Michael and Anshuman,

we're going to be talking about VR design process.

I know it sounds so exciting, right?

We hope that this is a talk with a lot

of practical advice for turning dreams into reality.

So the talk is broken into three different sections, each

focusing on a different set of practical advice

that we hope will be useful for anyone who is doing VR design.

Within the Daydream team, we use two

separate but complementary design processes.

Each one takes a different approach

but helps us serve different needs.

And the first one that I'll be talking about

is our rapid prototyping process.

It helps us explore terrain quickly,

finding promising use cases, and testing a lot of ideas

without wasting too much time on a highly structured process.

We refer to the projects that fall into this category

as Daydream Labs.

After that, Michael's going to come to the stage,

and he's going to be talking about our second process,

a robust iterative design flow that we

use for building mature apps.

He'll walk through the specific process

that his team used in building our Daydream Home world.

And to conclude the talk, Anshuman

is going to come up and talk about an even more fundamental

challenge that you're going to face

when making VR app's, which is building your design team.

So to give you an idea of where I'm going today--

oh, oh, before I talk about rapid prototyping,

I want to take a little bit of a step

back to consider where VR is today

and why we chose to put this talk together

in the first place.

So to give you an idea of where VR design is today,

let's talk about platforms that most of us

are more familiar with, mobile and web.

In terms of things like hardware design

patterns in the computational power that's available to us,

virtual reality feels a little bit

like designing for the web in the '90s.

So to target the mid-range hardware,

we had to design web pages for monitors that had

no more than 800 pixels across.

Design patterns were just emerging.

So we used things like the table element

to outline everything on our page.

Because it was really all that we had.

And keep load time short, we had to worry

about really simple things like image sizes.

Like even something like a transparent

PNG could just totally waste your download times.

So with VR in its nascent stage, we're

again having to pay very close attention to these three

aspects.

But unlike web or mobile, which took decades to mature,

we really do believe that VR is set to mature much faster.

For one thing, VR is a very open platform.

And basically from day one it's open to third-party developers.

Also, it already has this huge generous community.

And, in fact, I recognize some faces

in this audience from community members

who have already been very generous with VR.

And also, the underlying technology and workloads

are rapidly maturing.

I think that this conference is an example of that.

We're doing several talks on VR design process.

So this is really promising as a designer.

But there are still going to be a lot of challenges

for VR design.

Basically it's like everything is new.

So first of all, UI standards and design patterns

are just starting to take shape.

And like I said, this is one of several talks

we're going to be sharing our best practices.

And without the help of these established design patterns,

we need a lot more explorations to find ideas worth pursuing.

And once we've isolated a good idea,

we need a lot more iteration to turn that idea, that gem,

into a finished product.

So due both to the number of iterations

required and the number of disciplines and tools

involved, we take more time and more iterations

to create a great VR experience, compared

with other digital media.

So number two, head mounted displays, or HMDs,

these have their own unique design concerns

that we've never really had to deal with before.

So for one thing, VR devices they

obviously occlude the real world from us.

And this forces us to pay attention

to things like user safety as well as physical comfort

and also psychological comfort of the space

that we've created for you.

Next, we have to consider totally new methods

of interacting with our digital worlds.

Now even with the early stages of VR,

we've seen a lot of different ways

to use controllers to track your hands,

or to use something like vision to track our hands,

to make our worlds interactive.

So with all of this put together,

the new hardware and design patterns

mean that anyone working in VR is

going to need to become familiar with a whole new set of skills,

a whole new set of tools, a whole new set of workflows.

For instance, game design engines, or game engines,

have become an invaluable part of our toolkit.

Right?

Who would have guessed this?

And later in the talk, Micheal and Anshuman

are going to dig into the specifics of the skills that

are used for VR design.

Now since we're working with all these new tools, and skills,

and workflows, sometimes this means

we need to build a new team.

Sometimes the skills that we're looking for

aren't satisfied by the people on our current team.

So we need all these members who can

fill the multitude of niches used to create a successful VR

product.

So all of this combined forced us to develop a new design

process that allows us to move quickly

to develop magical experiences for users

and keep them safe and comfortable.

So now that you have a better feel for the challenges

that we face as designers, let's kind of launch

into our first big topic.

So this is the rapid prototyping framework

that we're using for Daydream Labs.

This was talked a little bit about more this morning.

There was a 10:00 talk this morning

about the findings in Daydream Labs.

So for decades, science fiction has

fed us these ideas about what might

be possible in a future in VR.

Some of these ideas hold real promise.

But others, as it turns out, when we actually

code them up and experience them,

either they're a little underwhelming or the hardware

just isn't there yet.

So the nice thing is that with rapid prototyping

we can cover a huge amount of unexplored territory

in a very short time, finding unexpected gems, and just

as importantly, taking these ideas that just aren't

compelling or where the hardware isn't ready,

and setting those aside for later.

So the process that I'm going to talk about today

has been refined by a small team that's

built more than 60 VR prototypes in less than a year's time.

We work in teams of two.

And we generally aim to release about one prototype per week.

That's the goal.

The teams are, broadly speaking, composed of one designer

and one programmer.

Although we're really generalists

with quite a broad array of kind of light skill sets.

And Anshuman is going to be talking

about more of that in his section about building a team.

The projects that we choose span a huge breadth of categories.

Some are really small and self-contained

like figuring out what makes for a comfortable reading

experience.

What size of text you should have.

How bright should the background be?

How much contrast do you need?

Others are bigger and more futureful,

like creating a system for authoring and editing

layered animations on a timeline.

So to help describe this rapid prototyping process

that we're using within the Daydream team,

I'm going to break it down into these five different steps,

brainstorming ideas, ranking those ideas,

implementing them, sharing the results,

and documenting the findings.

So let's start with our first step,

brainstorming these ideas.

So let's say you and your team have

decided you want to make a gajillion VR prototypes.

Where do you even go for those ideas?

Good news here, everyone has an opinion

on what would be awesome in VR.

Go to that relative of yours who is

like super bad with computers.

They have an opinion on what they want to see in VR.

I promise you.

Getting input from a diverse team is a really huge help.

If you have a team with a breadth of interests

and a breadth of experiences, that's

going to yield a breadth of interesting concepts for you

to work on.

So as you're thinking of these ideas,

here are some creative exercises to go through.

When possible, don't be incremental.

There's no need to do that for these kinds of prototypes.

Throw away all the assumptions and start from the ground up.

The best new VR experiences aren't going to be derivatives.

They're not going to be something

that you've seen in another media platform just transferred

over to VR.

They're going to rethink everything and be cognizant

of the strengths and weaknesses of VR in its current form.

Next it's really easy to be literal.

People love playing with kittens.

Let's make a VR space where you play with kittens.

Like this is virtual reality, people.

We don't need to be constrained by the familiar.

So let's make a world where you use your trebuchet

to launch giant stuffed animals that are fetched by your t-Rex.

Right?

Prototypes are a really great place to crank it to 11

and just see what happens.

You don't know how far you can go until you've gone too far.

Next, constraints are good.

Now this is a really weird one.

And I want to dig into this a little bit.

You don't want to over specify the implementation

details for a team that's working on a project.

But you do want to work with challenging constraints.

So I think this quote from Russian composer Igor

Stravinsky is useful.

He said, the more constraints one imposes,

the more one frees oneself.

And the arbitrariness of the constraint

serves only to obtain precision of execution.

So this seems really strange.

To kind of frame this, let me give you

an example of a bad constraint vs. A good constraint.

A bad constraint might be something

like, you have a team of 50 designers,

and you put this task out to them and you say.

create a classic board game in VR

that feels exactly like the original.

The problem with this is that it doesn't leave room

for creative interpretation.

So if you give this task to 50 designers,

you end up with 50 versions of checkers in VR.

So let's turn this into a good constraint.