The VR Book

Jason Jerald, Ph.D., is Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at NextGen Interactions. In addition to primarily focusing on NextGen Interactions and its clients, Jason is Chief Scientist at Digital ArtForms, serves on multiple advisory boards of companies focusing on VR technologies, coordinates the RTP-VR Enthusiasts Meetup, and speaks about VR at various events throughout the world. Jason has been creating VR systems and applications for approximately 20 years. He has been heavily involved in over 60 VR-related projects across more than 30 organizations including Valve, Oculus, Virtuix, Sixense, NASA, General Motors, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, three U.S. national laboratories, and five universities. Jason's work has been featured on ABC's Shark Tank, on the Discovery Channel, in the New York Times, and on the cover of the MIT Press Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. He has held various technical and leadership positions including building and leading a team of 300 individuals, and has served on the ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Virtual Reality, and IEEE 3D User Interface Committees. Jason earned a Bachelor of Computer Science degree with an emphasis in Computer Graphics and Minors in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Washington State University. He earned a Master and a Doctorate degree in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a focus on perception of motion and latency in VR. The graduate work consisted of building a VR system with under 8ms of end-to-end latency; the development of a mathematical model relating latency, head motion, scene motion, and perceptual thresholds; and validation of the model through psychophysics experiments. Jason holds over 20 publications and patents directly related to VR.

Virtual reality (VR) potentially provides our minds with direct access to digital media in a way that at first seems to have no limits.However, creating compelling VR experiences is an incredibly complex challenge.When VR is done well, the results are brilliant and pleasurable experiences that go beyond what we can do in the real world.When VR is done badly, not only is the system frustrating to use, but sickness can result.Reasons for bad VR are numerous; some failures come from the limitations of technology, but many come from a lack of understanding perception, interaction, design principles, and real users. This book discusses such issues, focusing upon the human element of VR rather than technical implementation, for if we do not get the human element correct, then no amount of technology will make VR anything more than an interesting tool confined to research laboratories. Even when VR principles are fully understood, first implementations are rarely novel and never ideal due to the complex nature of VR and the countless possibilities. However, the VR principles discussed within enable us to intelligently experiment with the rules and iteratively design towards innovative experiences.