Oculus VR
I was recruited into the Oculus team just as they were rebranding from Social VR to Metaverse. It was an interesting time to join the team because I had early access to the Quest and Horizon when it was still named Together. We went through close to a hundred different idea proposals and decided that there would be a core set of games, a gathering space town hall, an events system, and a world building experience. The game was largely meant to be social first, but some of the early bugs made me really question the validity of the app. There was one play test in particular that felt especially surreal. My manager at the time made us do all our stand ups in VR and we went into the virtual town hall. However, there were a number of strange bugs with the avatars. The first bug made it so you could only choose the default head, which at the time was a square jawed bald man. The second bug was that when you switched to a dress it would hide your pants, but there was no way to put pants back on when you put a shirt on again. So most people in the city center were bald men with no pants, including my female Russian manager. The last bug, which was by far the most disturbing was a popsicle, either red or yellow, and when you ate it your hands would spray red or yellow droplets. This of course made it look like people were peeing or bleeding all over this public space. I literally felt ill watching this happen, like a kind of embarrassed sea-sickness.
Now that Horizon is out in an open beta, the app is much more polished and well put together. A lot of the original structure it still part of the app, but the styles and polish are much better. Seeing real people using the app is pretty exhilarating, especially when they are having fun and talking.
My first project when I was working on Project Together was a game. I had to pick a game idea and prototype variations on it until we felt it would be a solid launch title. This was a hard task because I hadn’t really designed a game before, but I was super excited. It was also nice because the team gave us a lot of educational workshops to help organize our thoughts. The two best workshops were one focused on public speaking and another on the 4 keys to fun: easy fun, serious fun, social fun, and hard fun, run by Nicole Lazzaro. It was a great way to get started thinking about fun gaming systems and then present on them to the broader organization of nearly 300 people.
I started with a prototype that one of the engineers had built in a hack-a-thon, we called it shapetionary. You essentially would pull shapes out of thin air and arrange them into a sculpture based on the prompt given to you. We tried four or five different ways of structuring the game. We had 3 main goals: easy, social, and drop in. This meant that there wouldn’t really be a way to become an expert. A new player was just as likely to win as someone who played many times, it needed to encourage conversation, and the rounds need to be short enough to allow people to come and go without ruining the game for everyone else. We eventually settled on three variations. One was voting with reactions, another was voting for the most accurate, and the last was guessing in teams. The last one violated too many of the drop in drop out mechanics so ultimately we went with voting with reactions. Shapetionary was handed off at that point to another professional game designer who had joined the team by that point and I went back to my core competency: product design.
As a product designer, my favorite thing is to get a broad problem space with a high level assumption and figure out how to solve the problems to make a final product. On the Communities team on Project Together one of the biggest concerns was building community. With a lot of the traditional knowledge of community building events are the key to getting people together and making friends. Many people report that up to half of their friendships started at an event. And so my task was set, design the events system for Project Together. It was exciting because there were so many components to solve for. Who is creating the event? Who is attending the event? What happens when you are in the event in VR?
I started by auditing the existing events surfaces in VR from Oculus to all the VR competitors. I found that most platforms were very incomplete, but I designed a system that unified the four primary areas that someone would interact with an events system for Oculus: Oculus App, Desktop App, In VR, and In App VR. This was a big undertaking because there were different teams for each surface, but I found a system to unify the experience and got it all approved. Then the next stage began. How does this appear in the app for the creator and participant? I started by interviewing event producers in real life at events like Sundance. I then talked to our internal teams who would be running events in VR, and discovered a few core uses. One was a class where people want to learn a new skill, the next were tours where people wanted to explore together, and the final was happy hour social time where people just want to get together to talk. I isolated a number of VR first UI elements that would need to be built to enable all of these. One was a mic or sound system, the next was a video display that could show a live camera, a video or photo slideshow, and finally even posters to advertise the events in the spaces around town.
Building things in VR was a huge challenge, and still is but already things are much easier.
