Hosting a VR demo
Twice a year, the division I work for at Cornell gets together for a week of keynotes, training, and collaboration. For our February all-staff week, I pitched an AR and VR demo and my idea was approved: I got to expose three groups of 8 people to spatial computing!
It was my first “big” demo and I took a lot of time to do some research and organize the logistics. Here are my tips for a successful VR demo.
Safety first
I was going to use 3 kinds of head-mounted displays (HMD):
- HTC Vive
- Oculus Go
- Oculus Quest (x2)
The Go would be used on a swivel chair for 360 video watching so I wouldn’t have to worry about a true safety perimeter. For the other HMD, though, I would have to make sure that both the people in VR and the people around them would be aware of the play area.
I combined three elements to make sure that people were safe at all times:
- The Vive and one Quest would be demoed in a broad corridor so people attending sessions on the same floor could stop by and ask questions. I requested some safety cordons to delineate the overall play area.
- I bought some painter’s tape to “draw” the play area on the ground. This is particularly helpful for the Quest for which every user has to define their guardian: Having a tape rectangle on the floor gives first-time users something to point at.
- Finally, a colleague spotted each HMD station.
Jut look at that rug pattern ????
I created a document for facilitators to read before assisting in demos. Thanks to Rob Scott (@robscottsays), organizer for VR Manchester, for letting me reuse a slide he designed for their events.
Download it below (CC BY-NC-SA, PDF, [ddownload_filesize id=”1093″]):
Safety can be fun, too
I printed and posted the Dizzy VR posters by the play area. They got a couple of laughs.
What I love about these, though, is that they depict actual things that can definitely happen when in VR!
Hygiene
VR hygienic masks are pretty common by now and I am glad I got some right when I purchased the Vive for my team. It was the first time that I used them in a large-ish scale VR demo and I have learned a few things (see below).
Strapless VR hygienic masks; mine have straps.
We used alcohol wipes to sanitize controllers between each demo. It wouldn’t hurt for facilitators to use hand sanitizer in between demos, too.
What are you offering?
I thought that people might want to pick and chose the kind of experience they’d like to try during the demo. I wrote a “menu” and flagged which experiences had a lot of motion (world or user) or any content warning (a beautiful National Geographic video on the Go involved standing by the body of a dead elephant…)
I also wanted to make sure that people would have time to learn about the controllers—even very superficially. I included some diagrams of the three controllers we used on that day.
AR demos were self-directed, the easiest being playing with animal 3D models in mobile Google searches.
