Paul: Hey Jessica, thanks for talking with me today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? For example, your job role, your company, maybe a brief bio?
Jessica: Sure. I’m a culture and behavior researcher in virtual reality. What that means is I study online worlds that are being created in virtual reality, and then more broadly, I’m just paying attention to the types of products that are being created in immersive tech. That includes augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality. And my clients pay me to test their experiences with users. So, I’m acting, in some capacities, as a designer, and then in other capacities as a UX researcher.
Paul: Okay, cool. And how long have you been doing this?
Jessica: The first virtual reality demo that I had was two years ago. Prior to that I worked for as a web UX researcher, doing web and e-commerce research. When I tried the first VR demo in 2016, it just totally expanded my beliefs about what technology was capable of and I really quickly transitioned to doing research in immersive worlds, instead.
Paul: Cool. What will you be speaking about at XD IMMERSIVE?
Jessica: I’m running two workshops: One is a virtual reality workshop in the morning, and the other is an augmented reality workshop in the afternoon. One of my goals is to give give people a sense of the range of experiences that are available. So, it’ll be a quick survey of, “This is what’s happening in real estate, and retail, and manufacturing, and education, and entertainment,” just so there’s a base-level of knowledge.
In the virtual reality workshop, we’re going to design a virtual reality app that’ll be really focused on interactions. So, if people have any interest in interaction design and are really curious in how it’s going to be different in a 3D space, they should really come to this workshop to understand how the future of 3D design is going to change experience design. There’s some really, really interesting capabilities that, when you have movement tracking and user embodiment, open up to you.
In the afternoon session, which is all about augmented reality, we’re going to use our own phones to create augmented reality experiences. I’ve done this previously with other people, and there’s opportunities to create a wayfinding augmented reality app in 45 minutes or less. You could also create a kid’s storybook, or a retail experience, etc. My goal in coming to the UX STRAT conferences is giving people a sense of the array of tools that are out there and helping them learn how to start creating on their own.
Paul: Nice. And as you’ve given this workshop before, what seemed to be some of the “a-ha!” moments for people who really weren’t that familiar with mixed reality?
Jessica: How easily their insights did apply. I think that once people start getting a sense after doing demos and once they start to learn the immersive tech vocabulary, they see how their previous knowledge maps on to it, and that’s where the real creativity takes off. A lot of the people I’ve taught before have been UX designers and have this really strong grounding in the human experience and what makes an experience good. They bring that strong point of view with them to immersive work, and most of the same rules apply.
I see my goal as giving people the idea of, “This is the landscape of what’s available. These are the creation tools. This is how you can bring that same sense of taste and precision that you already have, and get the skills to start building things in new ways.”
Paul: And you’re on the west coast, so I guess the west coast is probably the forefront of mixed reality, with Google and Microsoft; all the big players are there. I’m wondering what you think our state of maturity is as a country, or even globally. Where do you see us in the curve of exploration, adoption, usage? Your role as a researcher is already beyond the bleeding edge developer/investor stage. So I’m just wondering, where do you think we are and what do you think is coming up next?
Jessica: I think AR is probably closer to consumers because we all own smartphones, and most are AR capable. There’s already been the “killer app” of Pokemon Go and there will be more. For virtual reality, there’s just not enough hardware in people’s hands right now, although I think that’s going to change over the coming years.
Paul: It seems to me that in virtual reality, the designer is sort of creating the world, and therefore that’s kind of open to imagination and technology as it develops. But I’m wondering if we even know what augmented reality is going to look like yet. It just feels like there’s a lot of room left for invention and interpretation in augmenting your actual daily reality.
Jessica: Yeah, I see it as a spectrum. There’s huge potential of recreating the human experience in both augmented reality and virtual reality. I did break it down into doing the morning workshop on VR and the afternoon workshop on AR, but to me, I feel like the way the technology is moving, we might just have one single pair of glasses that’s capable of both and we’ll move back and forth between the two of them. It’s hard for me to say like, “Oh, this one is the future,” because I think both of them are the future.
Paul: Sounds good. Anything else that people should know who are considering attending it?
Jessica: I think that they should know that it’s going to be hands-on and interactive. I want people to have at least a baseline knowledge of what’s already in the space and what are the types of experiences that are out there. But, people are really going to get to have experience designing interactions in virtual reality, and then we’re actually going to work on an augmented reality app together on their own phones. So if that’s appealing to them, they should really, really sign up, because it’s going to be something where, at the end of the workshop, they’re going to have a working AR prototype that they can show people.