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     In this frenzy of Virtual Reality (VR) adoption, it’s hard not to gravitate towards the hubbub and explore the possibilities for yourself. Let’s say, after some digging and trying out some clever immersive experiences at conferences and meetups, you finally give in and want to explore the possibility of using VR to train your employees or team members. But, where do you start? What do you need to get started? Can you actually use VR for your use case? How do you build it? Some of these questions can be overwhelming and might lead you down a rabbit hole on the internet. So, let's try to break it down here.

       
            There have been breathless articles written about how virtual or augmented reality is going to change everything for decades. Virtual Reality (VR) hardware (often glasses or goggles) allow the user to interact with a computer-generated immersive environment, where Augmented Reality (AR) devices overlay information onto the world without the processing power requirements of virtual reality. Costs are down, bandwidth is up, but it’s 2019, and with few exceptions, what Adam Draper of Boost VC calls “digital reality” remains a technology in search of a killer app.

    Virtual Reality today is truly off-the-shelf – the tools required for developing, disseminating and consuming a VR experience is available, accessible and affordable. This progress has enabled not only programmers but also technology novices to create significant immersive experiences. However, one of the major pieces missing in this field is a robust design and evaluation methodology that ensures that the experiences we create are not only immersive and interactive but also impactful.

       VR requires an iterative Design – Develop – Feedback loop more than any other computational media format. The main reason for this is that every VR experience is a subjective experience and it is imperative to factor the user in the design and development process early and often. The fundamental construct that elicits responses from the user in a VR experience is the idea of Presence – “the feeling of being there in the virtual environment”.

The idea of biometrics in XR isn’t a terribly new one. Methods like heart rate and eye tracking are pretty popular in the research community. Academic researchers have been using physiological signals to measure changes in user states for decades and some AR applications have begun integrating biosignals to inform changes to the system. What is a newer idea is using biosignals as a user controlled input method.

If the future of XR interaction means that users will communicate via customizable avatars, how can you trust that the user you’re interacting with is who they say they are? Part 2: Blockchain-based VR.

Read Part 1: AI Smart Avatars

Although augmented and virtual reality systems (which I will refer to globally as extended reality, or XR) have not yet reached the level of everyday ubiquity expected by some industry insiders, these technologies are being increasingly utilized in domains traditionally considered to be risky, such as aviation and medicine. This is Part 1: AI Smart Avatars.

2017 was an amazing year filled with so many exciting new projects, people, knowledge, and experiences. As we move into a brand new year, it is always nice to look back on all that was accomplished in the past year to help gear up for the new one. We at Key Lime Interactive are very excited to see all that 2018 has to offer!

The annual VRX conference was held in San Francisco, CA on December 7 & 8 2017.  Here are a few of the major takeaways from Key Lime Interactive’s Lead Researcher and Strategist, Rick Damaso, from this year’s event. 

Interview by Samantha Silver of Rick Damaso, the Lead Researcher & Strategist for Key Lime Interactive.

     Maybe you saw all the people wandering around glued to their smartphones when Niantic’s Pokémon Go launched in July of last year; or maybe you idly followed the release of Facebook’s Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Every year for the last few years, technology evangelists have claimed that “this year” is the year that virtual reality is finally going to take off. What’s the truth behind the hype, and what do you need to know?

Several decades ago there was the infamous “Internet boom” and now it seems we are going into the “Virtual Reality boom”. While in the beginning its uses were initially focused on gaming, VR is becoming an increasingly bigger market and it now has applications in social networking, science, and research. UX Research specifically has a lot to gain from incorporating VR into its practices. Using VR within a research setting allows the researchers to be able to put participants in a virtual space where they can be exposed to essentially anything goes beyond current limitations while keeping their participant in a safe and observable environment. This opens the doors of research to be able to accomplish a wide variety things that previously were only investigated by having participants fill out questionnaires. Now we can put participants in a virtual environment and obtain data that is as close to real world as ever before, allowing for much more in-depth collection of data.