Is the UX in “Oculus First Contact” a new VR standard?
That is the question
Oculus First Contact shipped on December 6th in parallel with the delivery of the Oculus Touch controllers. It is, like the names suggests, your first dive into the exploration of the controllers. If you want to see the full experience via video, I uploaded it here.
You are first put into a living room experience and greeted with every kind of electronic invented in the 80’s. #lifegoals
There is no type telling me to navigate the entire experience. It is only the reinforcing of simple gestures that I had previously learned. This is a sound approach to building a good user experience. A lot of user experience in virtual reality is going to be tied to muscle memory.
With the new touch controllers there are a lot of buttons. The first couple of times I had to think about which combination I needed to correctly interact with an object. Once I got it down, my brain took over. The repetition of the button combinations in the tutorial was a great way to learn the new controllers.
The robot gives you a number of different disks throughout the experience. Each disk teaches you how to use the touch controllers in a different way. However, once I started going through the motions and trying new things, I didn’t need to be told how to insert the next disk again.
A good user experience, no matter the platform, should show a user how to navigate it and re-enforce those interactions without telling them over and over.
There was UI popping up to hint at what to do next. I wonder what the experience would have been like had all those UI circles been taken out? If I wasn’t given any hints, would the outcome have been the same with just a slightly longer time frame?
For example, the highlighted disk port on the computer was enough indication for me to know what to do next. You taught me that with the first disk. Did you also need to include the circle telling me to insert it?
I’m not saying they did it wrong, if fact they choose the best outcome with their UI in the context of learning a new controller system, but let’s not be afraid to pull hinting and prodding out of our experiences. Context will play a big part in this, but if there is a button, the user will push it even if there is not an arrow telling them to do so.
The only actually problem I found with the experience was the sound of the constantly bouncing ball in 7:38 of my video. I dropped one on the floor and the sound continued for way too long. They should have toned that down a bit. Solution: If the ball is bouncing on the floor behind the camera for more than x seconds — kill the audio. The ball was out of my safe zone so I couldn’t pick it up to make it stop.
Before I conclude, let’s all give Oculus a round of applause for bringing floppy disks into VR.
Oculus First Contact is a great intro for the touch controllers. The throwback 80’s salute alone was a win. The solid gamification of this tutorial was an easy way for muscle memory to take hold of learning the numerous buttons of the controllers. Oculus delivered a solid piece that would be a great first memory for anyone who hasn’t experience the virtual world yet.
p.s. I also found a bug! When you press the button next to the machine a item is supposed to appear on top of the machine. But once in awhile it will appear in the machine.
