Our XR Comfort Work
Anyone creating a new reality for a human user, or augmenting their reality with new elements, has a lot to think about, and a lot of responsibility towards how that world will affect them. Either your user has to adapt and evolve to the reality you create, or the reality you create has to be built around the needs and expectations of your user. Understanding all the challenges and differences your user will face - both inside and outside the software experience - is essential to either route.
When I took on the responsibility to figure out how to make VR comfortable for PlayStation(R)VR players back in 2011, I quickly realised that creating believable synthetic realities is a new skill-set for developers to learn, but the reality-checking abilities of our brains was going to be an ongoing challenge that could easily get in the way of enjoying the experience. Humans have had more than fifty thousand years of experiencing reality as users, interacting with the world and the landscape around us, so we have a pretty good understanding of the way things work. Those six million years of experience have made each of us an absolute expert at spotting when things feel unreal or incorrect, down to the tiniest detail - and it’s very hard to fool an expert. Suddenly presented with a different reality and different rules, our hard-coded processes can struggle to make sense of a world that defies it's expectations, and that in turn can manifest as various physiological and psychological effects.
This area of XR design and development, known as XR Comfort (but really talking about discomfort of course) has been a prevalent presence in almost every XR experience I've helped over the last decade-plus, and has proven itself time and again to be something best catered for through smart design from the earliest stages of the development process.
Sometimes all it needs is some minor tweaks in a few places. More often, there are a myriad of tiny offenders that are all contributing to the the stack of discomfort the user is building up, and the work revolves around mitigating or avoiding individual contributors as well as addressing major trigger moments. Every now and again, a fundamental misunderstanding of comfort and discomfort on the part of the creators and developers can cause problematic elements baked into the core DNA of their designs, and this can be a costly and challenging discovery for a project to have to confront once they're deep into production.
My best advice is always the same here -- the sooner you know about your discomfort risks, the more easily you can design around them. You wouldn't build a house without surveying the land first. You wouldn't design a roller coaster without considering the risks to life and limb facing your potential riders. And you wouldn't design a car's dashboard controls without understanding your user's reach and need to keep their eyes on the road. So it makes sense that when you're designing a whole new world, or adding new elements to the one we know so well, you're doing it with your responsibility towards your users always at the forefront of your mind. User safety is always something that needs to be considered from day one, and throughout the development of your changing project, and it touches every user-facing decision you make.
Jed Ashforth
Here's some of the ways I regularly help immersive projects to overcome their comfort challenges ...
Early design analysis - I often work with my clients to sanity-check their initial paper designs and prototypes to highlight any potential sources of discomfort in their design. Catching the issues while in pre-production is the ideal time to pivot away from content or trigger elements that can add to discomfort.
Comfort Strategies - well organized teams often seek to consult early on their comfort strategies, to predict the systems and solutions they'll need to include. The correct selection, curated and tuned for your specific content, is the best way to go - offering a specialized clinic to satisfy each user's personal comfort needs intelligently is better than a pharmaceutical display of comfort settings that they don't know how to use. Users will love you when they know how to quickly address their issues for themselves. Planning and building these systems early in development keeps your team comfortable while working, your comfort risks predictable, and makes newly emerging comfort issues much easier to pinpoint and fix as you build.
Assessment and Feedback - I'll always include a comfort risk breakdown, and comfort solutions, in any work where I'm assessing and feeding back on a project in progress. Clients often comment that they appreciate this a lot, because every user is different, and there can be common discomfort issues that simply aren't being experienced by the developers themselves. Highlighting areas of potential discomfort for more sensitive users can give teams a vital heads-up before it's too late.
Comfort Clinic - Clients will often bring me on board when it's apparent that certain sections or systems within the title are causing discomfort for users during testing, or even among the development team during early production. This is my least favourite type of work, exposing myself to the problematic content repeatedly, but it's better for one consultant to be taking that risk than for your dev team and/or test users to be feeling bad!
