This work is restricted under NDA! For more information and further details, please do not hesitate to contact me!
Quick Summary
For this capstone project, I initially joined as a Product Designer for Horizon World: Meta's flagship virtual reality social experience that lets people social in the different virtual worlds, regardless of physical distance.
Designers, researchers, engineers, artists and managers, all in a bold mission to explore the future of work using cutting-edge tech.
Core Project Overview
Shaping the Future of Virtual City in Horizon World
Social interaction is an exchange between two or more individuals and is a building block of society. Social interaction can be studied between groups of people. The interaction could be accomplished verbally, emotionally, or physically depending on the comfort of the involved parties.
Back in the day, a physical gathering was a common style of social interaction. People would usually gather around and interact with one another. As human society became more structured and established with cafeterias, restaurants, movie theaters, and many more social hangout spaces, the social interaction style transformed over the years.
For this project, we are partnering with Meta and are working on Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality-based social experience. This product intends to enable and introduce social interactivity in the virtual world. The VR world not only allows people to interact and socialize in the space, but also users can create their worlds and host events of their interest. Horizon Worlds is a highly immersive experience with millions of everyday users and more than a thousand worlds created by users. Currently, we observed several interest groups forming on the Horizon Worlds like LGBTQ+ communities, role-playing, standup comedy, etc.
As a part of this capstone project, our goal is to design social interactivity in a virtual world. The project is intended to understand and consider different touchpoints of the users and find solutions that would enable smooth and engaging social interaction. Our goal is to understand user motivations and identify opportunities to establish a sense of community in the virtual world.
Research method at a glance
To have holistic answers to our research questions, we deployed various research methods. The methods that we used ranged from generating quantitative to qualitative results. Here’s a summary of the research methods we followed:
Before jumping into the research, as a team, we decided to familiarize ourselves with the VR world. VR was not only new technology for us, but adapting to the VR experience was challenging in general. Acclimatizing ourselves to the VR experience and being comfortable with the device was one of the first challenges we encountered in the project. It was important for us to spend some time with the VR experience to empathize with the users completely. Once we had a sufficient understanding of different gestures and acquired some experience of navigating through the Horizon Worlds, we were finally ready to proceed with the research phase.
We conducted a literature review for our secondary research to get a sense of different theories that advocate for social interactivity. It helped us understand different psychological factors to take into account when building social interaction spaces for humans. Intimacy and immediacy are the two core components of social presence. The two nonverbal communication components that have an impact on building social connections are interpersonal distance and eye contact. Diving deeper into theories like similarity attraction paradigm, preference of consistency, social penetration theory gave us insight into different human factors that may affect social connectivity.
The experience of using different VR apps was different. Acclimatizing to each of these apps helped us understand the journey of new users as they move around from one VR app to another. The way we formed our competitive analysis was we explored different onboarding videos, the experiences published on the organization’s sites, experiences shared by people in different communities i.e. user as well as creator community. Our main goal of doing the competitive analysis was to explore and learn from other competitors on how they approach social connectivity for VR platforms.
The competitive analysis was done on four key features:
The goal of conducting the user survey was to understand the perception of the users on the virtual reality experience and the Horizon Worlds, identify key areas that need improvements to narrow down the scope of this project, and recruit participants for user Interviews. The survey helped us identify participants' demographics and different themes that could potentially be our focus for the project.
The user survey included several quantitative as well as open-ended questions to gather qualitative data. Our survey was split into four major sections: general VR experience, avatar, and audio engagement, specific to Horizon Worlds experience. Gathering insights from the user survey, we then formed our interview script and recruited participants to conduct user interviews. We had 35 valid responses from the participants who have experience using VR.
The goal of the user interviews was to dive deeper into users’ experience on Horizon Worlds and build onto the insights gathered from the user survey. In the beginning, we didn’t have the budget to compensate participants. Hence, we had a 75% no-show rate on the first day of our user interviews. And also, after the first three interviews, we see clear distinctions for two groups of users, so we realize that we will need to recruit more participants to talk to for a holistic understanding of different groups of people’s experiences. So we started to reach out to more Horizon Worlds users on the Facebook communities and successfully recruited participants for the interviews. In the end, we were able to conduct user interviews with a total of 10 participants. And we were also able to secure funding from the HCDE department to compensate these 10 participants afterward.
Ideation at a glance
The Team Meeting in Horizon World
Special thanks to my sponsor Jeff, my team Nisha, Feifei, Peggy, Yile, as well as the entire meta team including but not limited to Nadia, David, Eleanor, Isabel and some of the other great people this capstone experience. Lastly, thanks to my school mentor, Taylor, Melissa, John for making this amazing opportunity happen in the first place.
The big learning! explore VR & AR design!
As these technologies become more prevalent, having expertise in designing immesersive experiences can open up exciting opporutunities in the industry.
This work is restricted under NDA! For more information and further details, please do not hesitate to contact me!