Designing for Hands

TL;DR

In AR/VR, traditional input methods are giving way to intuitive hand-based interfaces. The focus is on creating user-friendly UI components with continuous feedback, such as specifically designed buttons and innovative pinch-and-pull components. Other tools, like pointers and cursors, enhance user experience, while the virtual hand’s design ensures immersion and precise gestures.

Bullet points

✋ Hand Interactions: With the evolution of AR and VR interfaces, there’s been a trend of ditching traditional input devices. Instead, the use of natural hand gestures and movements is encouraged, making the experience more immersive and intuitive for users without the barriers of buttons or controllers.
🖲️ User Interface Components: In the absence of physical buttons or switches that are commonly found on traditional devices, there’s a pressing need for innovative UI components. These new components prioritize continuous feedback throughout a user’s interaction, ensuring users always know their actions are being registered.
🔘 Buttons: Even in a VR or AR setting, buttons remain a crucial component of user interfaces. But without tactile feedback, there’s been a shift towards visual feedback mechanisms. As a user interacts with a virtual button, it transitions through multiple states—like “default,” “focus,” and “hover”—to communicate its current status to the user.
📏 Design Specifications: Crafting the perfect button for AR and VR is an art and science combined. Parameters like button size, layout density, collider shapes, and optimal interaction distances have been carefully researched to ensure optimal user experience. For instance, near field buttons need to be large enough for accurate interactions, while far field buttons require consideration of angular size for distant interactions.
👌 Pinch-and-Pull: The pinch-and-pull mechanism has emerged as a groundbreaking VR interaction method. More than just a novelty, it offers a tactile sense of interaction, even in a virtual space. This mechanism has paved the way for a variety of picker components, allowing users to interact in one, two, or even three dimensions, enabling complex selections such as color shades in a volumetric space.
👉 Pointers & Cursors: A user’s guide in the vast VR or AR space, pointers and cursors offer vital feedback. Their design is dynamic, with elements like shape, color, and opacity changing based on the user’s interaction state. This adaptability ensures users always understand their current mode of interaction, whether they’re just pointing or actively pinching to make a selection.
🖐️ Hand Design: To make the virtual representation of hands feel authentic, designers combine static visual elements with dynamic feedback mechanisms. These virtual hands undergo subtle color shifts and pose changes based on the user’s gestures and interactions, enhancing the immersive feel and ensuring users always understand their hand’s current state and functionality.
🔄 Continuous Feedback: In a realm where physical touch is absent, the role of visual and audio feedback is paramount. By ensuring that every user action, no matter how minor, elicits a response from the system, designers can forge a stronger bond between the user and the virtual environment, making interactions feel more grounded and authentic.
📚 Best Practices: Crafting an effective VR and AR user experience isn’t just about innovation; it’s also about adhering to proven design principles. Leveraging concepts such as affordances, signifiers, and feedback, designers can create interfaces that are not only innovative but also intuitive, ensuring users can navigate and interact with ease.

Keywords

Affordances: Characteristics of an object that suggest how it should be used, without explicit instructions.
Signifiers: Indicators or symbols that provide clues about how an interaction should take place.
Button States: Different visual and interaction stages a button goes through, from being idle to being interacted with.
Near Field & Far Field Buttons: Classification of buttons based on their proximity to the user within a virtual environment.
Collider Shape: The physical shape and boundary of an object that detects interaction or collision in a digital space.
Angular Size: A measure of the proportion of one’s field of view taken up by an object, regardless of its actual size or distance.
Pinch-and-Pull Components: A type of interaction where users can pinch virtual objects and pull them for various functions.
1D, 2D, 3D Picker: Different dimensional selection tools in virtual spaces that allow users to make choices in one, two, or three axes respectively.
Raycasting: A technique used in computing to find where lines or rays intersect objects, often used in VR and AR to determine where a user is pointing.
System Pose & Pointing Pose: Different stances or positions of the hand to perform specific actions or gestures in a virtual environment.