VR Sketch Sheets

How do you sketch ideas in 2D for something that is 3D?

Workshops, ideation sessions, design jams… whatever you call them, they typically involve using pen and paper to quickly create and capture a breadth of concepts. Sometimes close to a hundred concepts created by a group of people in the span of a day.

Recently I’ve been leading and participating in a few virtual reality (VR) centric sessions. The tools we’ve traditionally used successfully in ideation sessions in the past were falling short of helping people get their VR ideas out of their minds and onto paper.

Instead of giving up and saying that paper and pen isn’t good enough, I started looking online for how other people have been sketching VR ideas. That’s when I found Vincent McCurley’s article on Storyboarding in Virtual Reality. I love that the template Vincent created for storyboarding VR is based on some basic principles of how people interact in and perceive depth in VR. Specifically, I appreciate the cheat sheet for the comfortable and the maximum head turning angles.

Vincent McCurley’s VR Storyboarding Template

Awesome! Done! Just print out some of these sheets and you’re good right?

6-up sheet for sketching VR storyboards

Not exactly. As Vincent points out, there are different areas of interest for a user, and the most likely area of interest is the space right in front of them. When it comes to quickly sketching new ideas for VR experiences, we’re usually focused on that immediate space in front of the user, which ends up being a thumbnail sized space on the 6-up sheet of VR storyboards.

So I started iterating on some VR concept sketching sheets.

Print, test, tweak, repeat

I realized that I also needed a better cheat sheet for distances. Here are some rules of thumb that helped me understand the VR template better:

• 15m ~= Width of basketball court
• 10m ~= Across a residential street
• 3.6m ~= Comfortable room

I added in reference points for the room and basketball court distances (the dotted lines) to make it easier to sketch the context of the VR experience in the right scale.

You’ll notice that I also added a first person viewport with a stick figure user to accompany the VR context sketch. The gray edges of the viewport are just outside of the user’s field of view. In triplicate on a page, this lets you sketch a quick storyboard (a starting condition, “then this happens”, and an ending condition).

Here it is in action:

Grab the PDF of this VR sketching sheet on Dropbox and try it out for yourself! Give me feedback in the comments about what works well and what doesn’t. Or iterate on the Adobe Illustrator source file and share your improvements in the comments!

Update:

I have an updated version of the VR Sketch Sheet available here, and a new article demonstrating them and asking the next question: How do you create a VR paper prototype after sketching up a concept? Let me know what you think of the updated VR Sketch Sheets!

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Design Strategy, User Experience Design, Interaction Design

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