Oculus Dash Redefines VR Interface and User Experience

Oculus Dash is a game-changing interface that's designed to make VR navigation a breeze.

With Dash, you can easily access your favorite apps and games with just a glance, thanks to its intuitive menu system.

The interface is incredibly customizable, allowing you to personalize your experience with tailored layouts and shortcuts.

This means you can tailor your VR experience to fit your specific needs and preferences.

Check this out: Hyper Dash Vr

Having multiple windows was a given feature in Oculus Dash, and it felt very natural to take advantage of the digital world to have many windows open.

The physical experience in traditional computing is bounded by the number of monitors at your disposition, but in VR, you can have many windows open with the pay off of improved ergonomics.

You simply open an application and spatial computing happens all around you, allowing you to have many windows open with the freedom to move and rotate them.

Visually, there were many questions and learnings along the way, including how to deal with resolution constraints and legibility of text.

We came across the idea of introducing the user to an invisible grid, only visible when trying to place the window panels in space, and ran many iterations to find optimal sizes for the main window.

The side complementary window panels were just as important, and we ran iterations in the arrangement of these panels to give the user guidance to arrange the windows as they wished.

We allowed for tilting and different facing-user positions, and added features like scale window and position window in Z space.

In traditional computing, monitors arms that allow the user more flexibility are preferred over the ones that are restraining and have a defined behavior, and we applied this principle to Oculus Dash.

We also learned from our studies in ergonomics that big clusters of information or big panels should be curved, while small information sources remain flat.

This informed our decision to make the panels curved when big, and animated to non-curved when they turned smaller.

We experimented with different spatial layouts, including non-curved UI with no separation of information, curved UI with no separation of information, non-curved UI with separation of information, and curved UI with separation of information.

These designs were tested and refined to create an optimal user experience.

Curious to learn more? Check out: Space Dash

The Oculus Dash interface takes all of the Oculus Rift's existing menus and reorganizes them into a central hub that can be operated with Touch Controllers.

Ergonomic studies were crucial in designing the Oculus Virtual Desktop experience, allowing the team to understand the importance of accessibility in space and make decisions for each interaction method. They learned from traditional working desk spaces and imported the nuances that made the most sense in VR.

The Belt, a key UI element, was designed to be non-intrusive and visually pleasing, with a form that was accepted and praised internally. However, the interaction with it required iterations over the visuals, including the size and animation of buttons, as well as natural feedback to inform the user.

Prototyping interactions was a key step in bulletproofing design ideas, and numerous prototypes were created to test the usability of the Belt and other UI elements. The team discovered the value of natural feedback in analog items, such as the soft damp on a knob or the snap of a switch.

Worth a look: Team Dash

In designing the Oculus Virtual Desktop experience, the team explored new interactions that leverage the VR medium, such as pulling windows out of other windows or having portable contextual menus. They also questioned whether some interactions made sense and were deserving to exist in VR, considering the current limitations of technology.

The latest update to the Oculus Rift system software has made pinning windows in VR easier than ever. A new button in the Oculus Dash interface allows users to bring up a list of all open windows and select the one they want to pin.

This feature was previously available in apps like Virtual Desktop, but it required a rather imprecise gesture to grab a window from the monitor view. Now, with the new update, it takes seconds to do and the chance of pulling the wrong window is effectively eliminated.

The update also requires co-operation from NVIDIA and AMD, as Windows 10 does not officially support it. Under the hood, Dash creates a virtual 4K monitor and uses it to “hold” the pinned windows users select.

To get the most stable experience with Dash’s windows features, users should make sure Windows 10 is up to date. This can be done under Start -> Settings -> Update & Security -> Check for updates.

Consider reading: New Dash

Ergonomic Studies are crucial for understanding how humans interact with their environment. They help us learn about the range of motion, comfortability, and natural postures of our fellow humans.

The field of ergonomics deals with the efficiency of humans in their working environment. This understanding allowed us to make critical decisions for each of the different interaction methods, and the displayed information in the Oculus Virtual Desktop experience.

A traditional working desk space has many nuances that have evolved throughout the years. We needed to learn from these nuances and import the ones that made the most sense in VR.

The positioning of the belt and its relation to content was essential because it had to be present but not be intrusive in the same way a keyboard behaves. A keyboard is an excellent example of a device with minimal intrusive rating into the traditional computing experience.

We also had to think of the natural positioning of your wrists and its rotation pivots, the ergonomics of the head when looking down to locate the Belt and the ergonomics of the eyes for your acknowledgment of certain queues in your peripheral vision.

Designing for Virtual Reality requires a deep understanding of human behavior and interaction. Ergonomic studies showed that the field of ergonomics deals with the efficiency of humans in their working environment, and how humans can use tools more naturally when their design considers the human form.

To create a comfortable and natural experience, we needed to think about the natural positioning of the user's wrists and its rotation pivots, the ergonomics of the head when looking down to locate the Belt, and the ergonomics of the eyes for acknowledgment of certain queues in the peripheral vision.

Prototyping of interactions is a crucial step in bulletproofing any design idea. Prototyping helped us think truly hard throughout the process of making any UI element non-intrusive and visually pleasing.

We discovered that making design invisible when not needed implies not only adjusting transparency but also making the element essential for the design problem it solves. The form of the belt was accepted and praised internally, but we had the problem of the interaction with it, which involved iterations over the visuals.

Natural feedback in analog items, such as the soft damp on a knob or the snap of a switch, would be amazing to have in VR. At the time, we had to work with the Oculus touch controllers, which allowed us to prototype ways to inform the user other than visually.

The final prototypes permitted for a small and effortless wrist turn for scrolling through the content of the Belt that kept and absorbed the momentum of the user motion. We also used a lot of the inputs in the controller for quick access in case the user was not able to make the scrolling gesture.

In VR, many interactions from the real world do not make sense and need to be replaced for new ones. Pulling windows out of other windows, having portable contextual menus, and hovering magnification glasses are just a few of the many interactions we were able to explore.

We would always try to question if some of these interactions made sense and were deserving to exist in VR. The current state of VR technology, such as limited resolution and field of view, makes it crucial to design a considered experience around the current state of technology.

Tangible window behavior, magnifier to deal with limited resolution VR displays, and command center interactions are just a few examples of the many explorations we conducted to create a more intuitive virtual experience.