In one of my afternoon walk which i do every single day after work, i stumbled upon this civil centre , CB1761 Casa de la Barceloneta located in Ciutat Vella ( meaning old town in Català ) , i walked this neighbourhood many time , so i thought i have seen it all ( atleast the big picture of Barceloneta .
The exhibition was about getting user more familiar with the neighbourhood of Barceloneta , this was made by students of Lasalle . The idea is using virtual reality, visitors can experience time travel, see historic buildings, and learn about their history and architecture by simply moving their head and interacting with their hands. pretty common honestly if you are in virtual reality industry, but what ill be writing is their UX Design, which in my opinion is highly user centric and some of the interaction they use, inspire one of my project too.
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Who are my user ?
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Considering they would like to showcase point of interest in Barceloneta , this UX includes navigation .Their solution shows that they had literally started with thinking of their non technical user who are not familiar with VR, which makes their primary question becomes: How might we turn a map that requires navigation into an accessible experience for people unfamiliar with VR?

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UX - Circular Experience Design

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Understanding that their target market, they implemented a circular navigation experience designed to simplify interaction with the virtual environment, where the user is placed at the center of a circular map within the VR headset. Their surrounding environment is overlaid with a darker layer, allowing only the building directly in front of them to be in focus. This design ensures that users are not overwhelmed by too much visual information at once.

Navigation is made intuitive and straightforward by using the thumbstick on the controller. Users can easily rotate the circular map by triggering the thumbstick, bringing different buildings into focus one at a time. Each building in focus has two buttons: one to move to the next building using the right or left thumbstick, and one to enter the building using the up direction on the thumbstick. This method requires minimal learning and reduces the complexity often associated with VR navigation.

Navigation is made straightforward by using the thumbstick on the controller. Users can easily rotate the circular map by triggering the thumbstick, bringing different buildings into focus one at a time. This method requires minimal learning and reduces the complexity often associated with VR navigation.

Each building has its own simple scene, accompanied by an auditory experience. They recorded sounds of birds and the sea from the actual physical spaces and integrated these sounds into the VR scenes. This ensures that as users explore each building, they also experience the ambient sounds associated with that location, enhancing the overall immersion.

That Circular carpet you see in physical world ? is their first circular map experience UX cue, pretty thoughtful i'd say !

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UI - Genie Effect UI

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I had mock it up pretty fast in Bezi on how their each soon UI look like.

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Discovery of New POI

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Even for me , who walks there almost very often, thanks to this experience i even found a lot of new point of interest that i ended up following it the route of the VR experience :) We always something to learn from others !

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