I had a project related to virtual reality in my Prototype class last semester at CCA. It was the first time for me to design a semi-immersive virtual reality environment. Using Processing and Tramontana, I designed a small environment where the user can use hand gesture and movement to control the volume of rain or sunlight when looking out of a virtual window. I found that the changing environment can affect the emotions of people in it. People in the environment can also change it to reflect their emotional status. After the project, I realized that there are so much potential in designing semi-immersive and immersive virtual environment and using the virtual environment to create unique experiences for people. I felt virtual environment design is an exciting new area in interaction design.
Related to virtual environment, John Ryan and Eric Mika talked about embedding interactions in physical systems in their talk titled “Space, the Final Frontier: Designing Interactions Beyond the Screen”.
As virtual environment can go beyond the constraints of physical environment, designers can create useful virtual reality for patients to improve their psychological peace and comfort, which may be ignored in traditional healthcare. Virtual reality can also be used in a number of healthcare areas such as patient treatment, physical therapy, surgical training, medical research, facility design, and so on. Essentially virtual reality is just another tool that facilitate communications among physicians, patients, caregivers, and administrators who are all part of the healthcare system.
As a designer, I believe many of the communication design principles that I have learned can still be applied to virtual reality design. Because virtual reality is still a new medium, there will be challenges and new questions the design needs to address, which I believe it is a great opportunity for me to grow my design skills and knowledge.
Beyond the personal growth, the quality and experience of virtual reality will affect the quality of its healthcare applications. It is important that the virtual reality design reflects the true needs of users and presents information to users accurately and efficiently. Our experience with virtual reality design will grow the collective knowledge of designing information enrichment environment and inform other design areas, such as data visualization, real-time communication, and 3D modeling.
At the society level, virtual reality needs to move beyond its initial entertainment purpose and help people improve their lives and the environment they live in. In addition to using virtual reality in healthcare, virtual reality can be used in cross-culture communication. People will get more opportunities to experience what they could not experience before, for example, the daily lives in another country and interacting with people in a new cultural event. As another example of how virtual reality can make positive impact to the world, one article I read ("Using VR to Document Climate Change") talked about a company trying to use VR technology to capture climate change and the challenges they encountered in the progress. The virtual reality technology gives people opportunities to be more creative and look for more exciting medium to tell stories. Audiences would like to read such stories better than a journal. The climate change VR film in the article vividly show what elements would affect our environment and how to make the right choice.