VRguy podcast Episode 25: Jason Jerald, Principal Consultant at NextGen Interactions - The VRguy's podcast
Summary: My guest today is Jason Jerald, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at NextGen Interactions and author of The VR Book. This episode was recorded on Aug 18th, 2017.<br> Jason and I talk about fine motor movements and pens in VR, motion sickness techniques and other aspects of human-computer interaction in VR.<br> <br> <a title="Subscribe on Android" href="http://www.subscribeonandroid.com/sensics.com/feed/podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a><br> <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-vrguys-podcast/id1071083566" target="_blank" rel="attachment wp-att-25553 noopener"></a><br> <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=80685&refid=stpr" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a><br> <br> <br> <br> Yuval Boger (VRGuy): Hello, Jason, and welcome to the program.<br> Jason Jerald: Thanks for having me.<br> VRguy: So who are you and what do you do?<br> Jason: My name is Jason Jerald, and I do, like many people I suspect listening to this podcast, is virtual reality. A little bit of augmented reality, but primarily virtual reality is our focus. I’m co-founder and principal consultant at NextGen Interactions. It’s kind of funny, 10 years ago I’d tell people I do virtual reality and they’d say, “Wow, what is that?” And in some cases they’d laugh at me. And of course, everything’s changed in the last few years. It seems that I’m certainly not the only person working exclusively on virtual reality. Everyone sort of gets it, and is excited about it, and the challenge is really making those VR experiences effective instead of something we just talk about.<br> VRguy: And you’ve summarized a lot of your work in a book that was published recently, right?<br> Jason: Yeah, so I have a book, it’s called ‘The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality’, so it takes a little different angle or perspective on virtual reality than a lot of other great books out there. This one is not so technically focused. It’s more upon the higher level design concepts, designed thinking of how you integrate different things together and it’s very interdisciplinary. There’s sort of the common answer, which a lot of people don’t like, but really is the truth, is the answer is usually “it depends”. We have different constraints, we have different end users, we have different goals, we’re using different hardware, and so there’s very few universal truths when it comes to virtual reality design.<br> VRguy: If you go back three or four years, I guess in VR terms, it’s when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, people were worried about motion sickness, and, “Oh, is it going to get me sick?” And so on and so on. Do you think that issue is primarily solved today? I mean, if you write an application and sort of follow the guidelines that major manufacturers offer, do you think that’s addressed or is that still an open question?<br> Jason: It’s definitely still an open question. In some cases, depending what you’re doing and what your goals are, we can certainly solve that. If you’re in a seated position and you don’t need to move virtually through the world, then you’re largely not going to have motion sickness, although there’s other challenges such as eye strain and such. Or if you’re using a wider area of tracking, you can physically walk around. However, once you want to actually move through a larger world, that can become more challenging, and there’s some great options like teleportation, which can pretty much prevent motion sickness. But again, there’s trade-offs to that. So when you teleport, for example, your users can get a little bit confused of where they moved to, or what their new orientation is, so there’s a lot of trade-offs there. There are no perfect answers,
