A Crash Course in Designing for Virtual Reality. Or Why Laser Pointers Suck and We Can Do Better

Download the Slides or pdf.

Follow up and Further Reading

Starship Home - Make it Goopy! Make it Magical. Mixed Reality is pretty great for establishing depth cues.
Beat Saber - Let Users Choose Color.
Tetris Effect - Periphery and Design of output over design of input. My favorite VR Game.
Nock - Core Interaction Emphasis. Menu is Gameplay.
Rumble (Quest) - Diagetic Menu. Constrianed Tangible Interfaces. Pose and Feel.
Vacation Simulator - Zone based Teleportation, adjustable height tables.
Honestly check out all of Owlchemy Labs games, they might be the best at accessibility considerations and VR Design.
Cubism VR - Subtle Depth Cues in Void.
Laserdance - Not out yet but… cmon. Design for Kinesthetics!
Moss and Moss 2 - Abundant depth cues. Diorama scale. Outputs over novel inputs.
Tea For God (Release Press) - Incredible redirected walking/non-euclidean spaces for locomotion.
The Lab - Valve’s design experiments. Various interesting design ideas.
CoasterMania - Floor scale. Just show the controls on the controller.
Bam - Controls on the controller. Diorama scale.
Puzzling Palces - I made fun of it for showing a flat image of a controller in VR, but it’s a really great game!
Little Cities - Just lets me push a button with my hand, I don’t have to use a laser pointer. Floor scale.
Half-Life: Alyx - Hands to communicate role play.
Broken Edge - Core Interaction Emphasis.
Until You Fall. Encourage Movement. Hide teleportation under actions. Aggressive Vignetting.
Trombone Champ: Unflattened - Kinesthetic. Silly. Dust Motes.

Mouse Car - My ‘Ironic Design Execution’ project to control your computer mouse like a car. It’s Intuitive!
Redirected Walking
Learning to Do Design Thinking for Immersive Experiences
Logitech MX Ink - VR Stylus for Quest