12Jul/16Off
When Virtual Reality Meets Data Journalism
What We Learned
VR brings its own challenges. Here is what we noticed in particular:
- There’s no room for lots of text, so you’re trying to do something simpler in a more complicated environment. The visual actually includes less data than the original. In fact, the more text you have, the more likely it is that you will make your viewers sick. And not making people feel sick is a key obsession of developers working with VR: you’re putting users in an alternate reality and if that reality doesn’t behave in predictable ways, then it can make people want to vomit, literally. It’s the equivalent of motion sickness.
- The viewer no longer needs to “click” or “tap” to demonstrate intent. But it also raised the question: how long should the viewer have to look at something to “activate” it? Also, our early prototype was giving us headaches (literally) until we realized that our virtual “eyes” were too far apart in the virtual world — as though the left eye were 10’ away from the right eye.
- It’s all about location. Movement in the virtual world can be disorienting, so we found it more effective to spread the information around the viewer. The Pitch team sketched Inception-like ways of bending maps, exploring laying out information in space as one would on a print page. Secondary “sidebar” information could be the area behind you, for example.
- Looking down is much more comfortable than looking up. So, look down in this and you see the European flag, to help ground the viewer (and provide a nice visual trick).
- Instructions can be helpful. Pitch’s Adam Florin describes the technology as “still a bit of a moving target, especially on mobile”. An incoming call produces a pretty disorienting experience, for example. This is such a new area, we felt it needed instructions. A screen tells you what to do and there are pointers to help you look in the right direction.