Virtual reality · 2019
Google Earth VR
Letting someone hold a planet without making them motion sick. Scale, locomotion, and the vocabulary of flight.
Defining the problem
Teleportation kept people oriented. It also kept them disconnected — and afraid of heights the moment they let go.
VR had no established design patterns yet: new controllers, new displays, and a dataset built for desktop and mobile that suddenly had to work at any scale, from a city block to a planet. Teleportation was the default way to move through virtual space at the time, but our study participants lost their bearings every time the scene cut.
We replaced it with flying and dragging instead. That fixed the disorientation, but it surfaced two new problems: a fear of heights once people found themselves hundreds of feet in the air, and simulator sickness whenever the world moved while the body stood still.
Process
We brainstormed and prototyped alongside engineers, then evaluated with think-aloud usability studies and cognitive walkthroughs — plus dedicated ergonomic studies to get UI angular size and placement right for a handheld laser pointer.
Scale to comfort
Dynamically scale the player to keep their feet on the ground, at any elevation, to defuse the fear of heights.
Tunnel Vision
Give the eyes a visual anchor to the real world and blur the periphery during motion, to keep simulator sickness at bay.
Make it feel alive
Physics, subtle haptics, and a spatialized soundscape — chirping birds, adaptive music — do as much for immersion as the visuals.
What we learned
Solving movement and simulator sickness didn't just ship a product — it gave the rest of VR a pattern to build on.
Since launch, Earth VR has been downloaded over 370,000 times on Steam and ranked the #2 most downloaded VR app on the platform. The project went on to win a 2017 Cannes Lion for Innovation, a 2017 Lumiere Century Award, and Best HTC Vive Experience at the 2016 Viveys.