As VR/AR and other XR media grows with increasing pace, we had the chance to talk to Neilda Pacquing, who is a VR/AR developer and an expert on user experience. Neilda sees many opportunities for VR in training and education, and has drawn our attention to the lack of non-sexualized female characters on the market. If you want to contribute to helping developers around the world, participate in our Challenge: Female Characters and promote your favorite female-friendly characters.
I’m a Product Experience Consultant and rapid prototyper for entrepreneurs, makers, and doers. Years ago, I left a career working in sales to join the tech industry as a user experience and interaction designer to make digital products for millions of users. After designing apps for companies such as Bank of America and SEPHORA, I decided to start my own business, SparkWorks Creative. I work with clients through private consulting to take their ideas to the first prototype, rapid prototyping services, and UX consulting. I currently live in San Francisco, in the heart of all things tech. I have a passion for virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and am working on a self-defense VR app for women called EmpowHER.
Back in March 2014, I put on my first headset, the Oculus Rift DK2, at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I remember being told to sit down on a chair and was handed a console while someone helped me put on the headset. I was blown away from that first moment of being placed in a spaceship and seeing my outfit change as a character in the game. At that moment, I realized that this medium had some amazing potential. The very next day, Facebook announced their acquisition for $2 billion.
It’s very important to differentiate VR/AR/MR. VR is great at bringing the user to a new environment and feel like they are part of it – even have another identity. AR is great at providing an extra level of information (kind of like a superpower) on top of what exists in the real world. MR has a combination of both. Overall, I see the potential of these technologies in education/training and medicine. For example, there are apps that are being used to provide therapy, treat depression, PTSD, lazy-eye, phobias, and pain. There are also training programs to simulate operating rooms, driving trucks, working in restaurants, and how to fix broken machinery.
There is research being made on VR’s effect on the brain that I’m very fascinated with. I feel the findings will continue pushing boundaries in many areas in life – hopefully for the better. We are only scratching the surface. If impact is what we’re after, we need to start looking into industries that have challenges VR/AR/MR can solve.
Neilda Pacquing, www.neilda.com
A couple of things I always think about when designing any digital product are accessibility and adaptability. Questions I ask are: 1. How would someone with disabilities experience this app? 2. How easy is it to pick up and start using?
An opportunity that comes to mind is utilizing captions when characters speak or sounds play in VR. Having captions also help when a user steps into your VR world and is distracted by their surroundings or someone uses an AR app with a noisy environment. I don’t foresee a feature like this hurting, especially if creators allow the users to turn the feature off.
A mistake I notice is a creator’s desire to recreate the real world by introducing too many new gestures and requiring tutorials to learn them all. If there’s too much to learn, the user will be overwhelmed with cognitive load. The VR world is already new for most people coming into it. It’s best to keep as many of their natural gestures as possible.
Last but not least, it’s important to realize that gaming and entertainment are not the only industries that will benefit from VR/AR. I challenge people to look for real problems from real people and see if and how VR/AR can solve them.
I’m happy you addressed this question. When UploadVR’s sexism scandal was brought into light, I was actually taking their evening VR development classes at the same time and felt a bit uneasy knowing that I was supporting their business while it was happening. However, my main focus was learning how to make apps of my own so I stayed until the very end. I don’t regret this decision. If I wanted to have an environment that favors people like me, I knew that I needed to be a creator myself and help others feel welcome in it.
The community I’ve surrounded myself with in this industry has been nothing but supportive. I’ve learned so much from them and I feel fortunate to have the resources that I do considering that I live in San Francisco Bay Area.
One thing I find interesting is the number of VR learning tutorials and games that show you how to create a shooting game. Why is this? When I learned how to build my first VR app using Unity, it was for a shooting game and there were a lot of free gun assets available for download to use. It guess that tells you about the culture of VR so far.
Adult content is also a big money maker and it’s the industry that is making a profit in the VR space, which is understandable. I realized this when I was looking for 3D stock models and was shocked as I did a side by side comparison of “male” and “female” on CGTrader. Searching “male” returned results as expected, but “female” results returned majority adult content. I took a screenshot and shared to my networks to raise awareness and see what can be done to change it.
CGTrader also checked that there is more adult content associated with female character 3D models than male (20% vs. 2% of female and male character models respectively), so to improve this disbalance they are now organizing a design challenge for Female Characters.
I feel that to be more welcoming to women developers and content creators, we need diverse assets that are non-sexual. We also need non-sexual and non-stereotypical women of color. Creating assets take time. It would be great if designers made it easier for developers to make things.
I’m creating an empowering self-defense VR app called, EmpowHER, with my partner Sarah Hashkes. Our goal is to increase the amount of safety a woman has in any situation by providing her with empowering tools to deal with various situations that threaten her safety. We hope to reduce the amount of fear women deal with on a daily basis.
Last week, we built our first prototype at a VR Wellness Hackathon that was sponsored by Google, HTC Vive, and NewPath VR. We ended up winning two awards, Most Impactful Idea (First Place) and Most Likely to Lead to Sustainable Behavior Change. The Most Impactful Idea award includes a Priority Application Status for an HTC VR for Impact Grant. We’re crossing our fingers that we get some funding so we can build our app further.
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