Design Thinking for Virtual Reality Experiences

Now that we have acquired various tools and skills, it is time to learn about design thinking for VR experiences. Design thinking is a powerful concept that enables you to create immersive worlds and projects centered around humans. It emphasizes problem-solving and innovation through a systematic approach that enables us to create what we want and what people need. Through the tenets of design thinking, developers can empathize with users to understand their needs and design VR experiences that are more relevant to the user’s interests and more engaging. This process requires a balance of technical and creative skills, thinking outside the box, and applying those nuances to develop a project that people can ultimately utilize.

Design thinking is an interdisciplinary approach that enables you to draw from different areas, industries, and experiences to incorporate the best results into your project. As a medical student with...

Technical requirements

The complete source code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Enhancing-Virtual-Reality-Experiences-with-Unity-2022/tree/main/EnhancingVRExperiencesFullProject/Assets/_VRProjectAssets/Scenes/Chapter_10.

An introduction to design thinking

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving that emphasizes empathy, creativity, and iterative prototyping. It aims to understand users’ needs and desires, fostering a unifying language for multidisciplinary collaboration and leading to more innovative solutions more quickly.

The design thinking process consists of six main steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement (Figure 10.1). It begins with empathizing with the customer and understanding their needs, gains, and pains. Next, the problem is defined based on gathered insights. During the ideate step, potential solutions are generated, followed by rapid prototyping and testing with real users for feedback. At the end of these five steps, we can implement the elements into the final production of our VR project. By prioritizing customers’ needs, design thinking generates novel ideas that delight users, ensuring continuous improvement and refinement...

Creating our design document

In the previous section, we discussed the importance of design thinking when creating immersive VR experiences. Now, we can use this foundation to design our own VR project by developing a comprehensive design document that clearly defines the project’s goals, audience, and features. This document will also guide us through an iterative creative process so that we can refine our ideas.

To begin, we need to identify what our target audience can expect to gain from the VR experience and define the scope of the project. We will then start the iterative creative process, expanding on a list of key features and refining our ideas as we go. Throughout this process, we will explore relevant research, references, and resources to help us make informed design decisions.

Using the insights gained from our design thinking process, we will create a robust roadmap for the project that guides us from start to finish. This roadmap will detail the implementation...

Experienced design

After completing the design document, the next step is to bring the VR experience to life in the Unity Editor. This involves a range of activities, including creating maps, custom assets, prototypes, and code, as well as downloading assets from the Unity Asset Store or other sources. In this chapter, we will focus on designing the map, which includes grayboxing and kitbashing techniques. By the end of this part of this chapter, we will have a fully populated space with assets, allowing us to navigate through it using our VR rig. This is a critical stage in the development process as it provides the foundation for the entire VR experience. Through careful design and iteration, we can create a space that is engaging, immersive, and intuitive for users to explore.

Designing the maps

To prepare building our virtual world maps, we’ll create a 2D image map in Google Drawings to organize our layout and assets. This will save us time and provide us with a solid...

Summary

By following a systematic approach, we were able to create a prototype of our virtual world with various tools and skills. We focused on design thinking for VR experiences, which is a powerful concept that enables us to create immersive worlds and projects centered around humans. Design thinking is an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes problem-solving and innovation through a systematic approach. We covered the basics of design thinking, its main principles and processes, how to apply it to VR development, and how to incorporate it into a VR development workflow. We should now have a deeper understanding of design thinking and how to apply it to any project, regardless of its size, and use it to create a comprehensive and innovative VR experience. In the next chapter, we will move on to phase five of our roadmap, where we will start to add audio to it.