The VR Book

Virtual reality (VR) can provide our minds with direct access to digital media in a way that seemingly has no limits. However, creating compelling VR experiences is an incredibly complex challenge. When VR is done well, the results are brilliant and pleasurable experiences that go beyond what we can do in the real world. When VR is done badly, not only is the system frustrating to use, but it can result in sickness. There are many causes of bad VR; some failures come from the limitations of technology, but many come from a lack of understanding perception, interaction, design principles, and real users. This book discusses these issues by emphasizing the human element of VR. The fact is, if we do not get the human element correct, then no amount of technology will make VR anything more than an interesting tool confined to research laboratories. Even when VR principles are fully understood, the first implementation is rarely novel and almost never ideal due to the complex nature of VR and the countless possibilities that can be created. The VR principles discussed in this book will enable readers to intelligently experiment with the rules and iteratively design towards innovative experiences.

Author Biography

Jason Jerald, Ph.D., is Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at NextGen Interactions. In addition to primarily focusing on NextGen Interactions and its clients, Jason is Chief Scientist at Digital ArtForms, is Adjunct Visiting Professor at the Waterford Institute of Technology, serves on multiple advisory boards of companies focusing on VR technologies, coordinates the Research Triangle Park-VR Meetup, and speaks about VR at various events throughout the world. Jason has been creating VR systems and applications for approximately 20 years. He has been involved in over 60 VR-related projects across more than 30 organizations including Valve, Oculus, Virtuix, Sixense, NASA, General Motors, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, three U.S. national laboratories, and five universities. Jason’s work has been featured on ABC’s Shark Tank, on the Discovery Channel, in the New York Times, and on the cover of the MIT Press Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. He has held various technical and leadership positions including building and leading a team of 300 individuals, and has served on the ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Virtual Reality, and IEEE 3D User Interface Committees. Jason earned a Bachelor of Computer Science degree with an emphasis in Computer Graphics and Minors in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Washington State University. He earned a Master and a Doctorate degree in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a focus on perception of motion and latency in VR. The graduate work consisted of building a VR system with under 8ms of end-to-end latency; the development of a mathematical model relating latency, head motion, scene motion, and perceptual thresholds; and validation of the model through psychophysics experiments. Jason holds over 20 publications and patents directly related to VR.