With the advent of this new paradigm, many developers are wondering what the ideal design is for VR and AR programs.

In order to do that, we should ask: what is fundamentally different about VR/AR right now?

The answer is several things.

1. It’s a 3D motion captured controller.

Even without a headset or any other new methods of displaying visuals, the ability to aim a controller in different directions to trigger different functions opens up fundamentally new possibilities for interaction.

What does this mean for designers?

It means that if you’re designing a menu for any program in VR, you’re not going to want to have small buttons that would therefore be difficult to aim at with a VR controller.

Instead, it would be much easier for the user to have buttons that are not just big, but are spread out all around you.

This could either be done around the immediate vicinity of the controllers, or all around the user (with a flat map of it in front of the user’s eyes, showing where the cursor is pointing in any given moment, as if the sphere is a mouse pad) like so:

Once you select a button though, it could lead you to another menu, and another, and so on, much like the drop down menus on your pc, or folders in your smart phones, or any number of systems that designers have created to organize content in categories within categories. Like so:

But if the range of motion becomes less easy in certain directions (like behind or below the user) and thus accuracy becomes less reliable, targets could become bigger there in proportion to the more easy directions (such as in front of or above the user).

But most VR kits available to consumers today have not just 1 controller, but 2 controllers, one for each hand. So instead of just one menu, you can have two. If the menus are all around you then this will mean overlaying them on top of one another (but still displaying flat maps of them in front of you, side by side).

But that’s not all. The headset itself has motion tracking of course, so it could be used as yet another device to point at yet another menu all around you (with yet another flat map of it in front of your eyes). So even before high quality eye-tracking technology becomes available to consumers, we can still have the next best thing.

However, it would probably be more useful to use the headset in a more nuanced way instead. There could be many different menus in front of you, each with their own cursor, and the only cursor being moved is the one on the screen that you’re currently looking at.

2. It’s one very big “screen”.

Even without any complex features of a virtual environment, a VR/AR headset is more useful than a traditional screen simply because it results in the effect of a new “screen” that many times bigger.

In fact in VR/AR, your screen is not just bigger than a standard PC screen, or even a movie theater screen, but potentially as big as your entire field of view in every direction.

What does this mean for designers?

It means that your Facebook news feed, let’s say, (or an equivalent of it) can completely surround you like you’re a super villain in your lair.

It also means that unlike the interface for a PC, designers don’t need to spend so much of their time coming up with ways to tuck windows and buttons out of view by creating drop down menus, start menus, and so on.

Now every option and action can be placed on the “screen” at once as long as a user’s computer has enough processing power to handle it.

In fact, there are many programs and websites that preview an action before you perform it, like Google with autocomplete, Photoshop with it’s filters, or even Youtube with the seek bar.