Understanding the role of visuals, sound, RTGE, and storytelling in VR can help you develop more immersive experiences. Here’s what you should know:
Key Takeaways:
- Good visuals and realistic models are essential for a positive UX.
- Sound design, done right, complements the visual elements in VR, creating a truly immersive experience.
- Sound design advances the narrative, promotes a sense of time and place, helps users understand the localization of events, triggers emotional reactions, and provides synchrony with images.
- Real-time game engines provide the framework for creating VR experiences, allowing you to effectively create, view, and adapt environments and assets for a virtual space.
- The story should immerse active and passive audiences alike, and invite rather than coerce them into the experience.
Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly becoming part of our everyday experience. From its early days when it was mainly used for gaming, VR now extends to other sectors – education, recruitment, real estate, healthcare, and entertainment. More immersive experiences blur the line between the digital and physical realms.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimates immersive technologies will boost global GDP by $1.5 trillion by 2030 – with product/service development and healthcare sectors poised to be the biggest winners. Training, process improvement, and retail sectors are not far behind. As this phenomenon unfolds, most forward-thinking companies are considering immersive technologies to help them create value and reduce costs.
This article explores the tools, approaches, and techniques for developing immersive experiences and staying ahead of the competition.
Graphic design
Good-looking and well-designed 3D models and visualizations are the foundations of a positive user experience in VR development. Whether you’re developing an AR configurator, a 3D game, or a VR training scenario, you want the models to have smooth edges, good textures and look as realistic as possible.
For full appreciation, VR environments must be user-friendly, interactive, explorable, accessible, believable, and distraction-free.
Opting for lower-quality graphics may seem like a good idea to save money when developing in VR, but most people won’t give dated or lousy visuals a chance.
Additionally, hardware with limited computing power is not recommended for attempts at performance improvement. Usually, the problem with low frame rates and poor performance isn’t quality visuals but bad optimization. This means you’re better off optimizing great visuals for the intended application or device than going with lower-quality graphics.
Sound design
When users interact with a virtual world, they expect to obtain auditory feedback on their actions similar to that of the real world. For example, if they drop a mug, they expect to hear a sound associated with the fall. If there’s no sound, or if it’s not a good replica of the actual sound of a cup hitting the floor, it would break the flow of the experience and pull the users from the virtual world.
This implies that the sound elements in VR – music, sound effects, and 3D audio – are just as important as visual ones.
Sound not only builds and reinforces interactions, but it can also convey emotion and depth, guide users through new landscapes, and even create the illusion of tactile sensation when combined with visual feedback and hand tracking. It can make the virtual experience seem real, but it has to be plausible and convincing enough to keep users immersed – which is only possible through good sound design.
Looking to create a unique and memorable immersive experience for your customers? Shockoe can help you lead the way in reshaping how your users interact with you. Schedule a call to discover innovative VR solutions for your business.
Real-time game engines
Real-time game engines provide the framework for creating VR experiences and are an absolute must-have for immersive workflows. They enable businesses to effectively create, view, and adapt environments and assets for a virtual space.
Most popular VR engines today allow for heavy customization with APIs and can be easily integrated with VR platform-specific SDKs. They also allow app publication on all main operating systems instead of using a different tech stack for every platform.
Unity and Unreal are currently the most popular game engines in immersive creation. These two engines have many similar features and support several VR devices including Microsoft HoloLens, Oculus Rift, Google’s Daydream View, Gear VR, Playstation VR, and Steam VR HTC-Vive.
- Unity uses C# and has a larger collection of audio files, textures, and 3D objects, giving you more options for developing VR experiences. It also boasts rapid iteration capabilities and a highly optimized stereoscopic rendering pipeline ideal for optimizing 3D content.
- Unreal uses C++ allowing for more complex and sophisticated developments, better performance, and more realistic VR experiences in gaming, animation, film, and television.
Choosing between these tools is anything but arbitrary and you should consider the hardware and software you intend to use, your team’s skill set, as well as your planned outcomes in your decision.
Remember, real-time game engines are just tools for creating worlds, and the bounds of what you can do with them ultimately depend on your imagination. Shockoe can help you innovate and unlock new opportunities for growth. Contact us today to learn more.
Storytelling
A truly immersive experience not only looks and sounds great, but it also includes a captivating story. It engages active and passive audiences alike, facilitating appreciation simply by their presence. Since you’re inviting (not coercing) your audience into the experience, you should consider all potential participants. If you want to tell a detailed story, fantastic! Just make sure it doesn’t alienate the casual viewers.
Get help with developing immersive experiences from Shockoe
Effective VR development requires an interdisciplinary approach – pulling together people with different skill sets to improve workflows and overcome creative challenges. That’s where Shockoe comes in.
Shockoe’s team of dedicated experts includes professionals with a wide range of backgrounds: software engineering, project management, product design, and digital content strategy. These pros work cohesively to help clients create their vision hassle-free.
We combine industry best practices with creative techniques to help you create successful immersive user experiences. Contact us today for expert help with VR development.
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