NIKOLAI MUNK PETERSEN: The sky's the limit, they said.
They said your imagination is the only thing holding you
back.
We discovered that there's more to this story,
and I'm going to share with you what we found.
My name is Nikolai, and when you're
building augmented reality experiences that
allow users to move around, you have
to think about real hard physical limits.
Let's say you have designed an icy virtual world
for a much anticipated massively multiplayer online
roleplaying game.
You have only had time to create one small ice floe and one
main character, the penguin.
Your user lives the penguin life on the ice with their friends,
but is growing increasingly frustrated
by the ever-growing number of penguins.
The user therefore decides to jump off
the ice to explore new inhabitable worlds.
What happens next?
The user's room is too small to fit any more ice floes.
The icy world doesn't scale.
What should the user do?
In this episode, we will talk about how
to handle physical boundaries that
obstruct the virtual space.
A very simple but powerful method
to design around any kind of boundary
is to put an invisible fence around the user.
We built a small example to show you how that works.
The fence serves two purposes.
First, it tells the user where the virtual world ends.
Second, it helps the user not walk into physical walls.
Yet it is a fence, and it does impose rather
direct and hard constraints.
So let's look at some other gentler ways
to handle physical boundaries.
In mobile devices that promote physical movement,
such as Project Tango, how do you take into account
the hard fact of life that is full of doors
and walls and furniture that you can bump into,
and how do you leverage this hard reality
to make stunning experiences that
deliver on the promise of seamlessly blending
virtual and physical worlds?
If the virtual world has a fixed size,
it may or may not fit within the physical space.
An ice floe may fit in your room,
while a glacier probably won't.
As a developer, it's important to be
proactive about these challenges.
Using a slightly more advanced version of the fence concept,
you could let the user define the space
by marking its corners.
In this example, we put out four markers to fence
off the play space.
The system automatically fits the virtual world
within the available space.
As an alternative, you can let the user scan the surroundings
using the depth perception system
in Project Tango at the beginning of the experience.
The system can use this 3D information of the surroundings
to calculate a bounded box and build the virtual world
within it.
If you do not manage to fit the virtual world
into the physical, the user may not
be able to get to all the places within the world.
For these situations, the user can
benefit from either the clutch or teleportation modes.
In clutch mode, the user pauses motion tracking for a moment.
This effectively pins the virtual world
to the Project Tango device so the user can rotate it, like
here, or move it with them.
If the user is facing a physical wall
with the virtual world in front of them,
the clutch can be used to rotate the virtual world around 180
degrees, and by doing so they can get places
that were out of reach before.
The clutch control is powerful, but can be a bit complicated
for users, so instead you may want to try teleportation.
Teleportation petition allows the user to jump places.
These can be pre-defined destinations, or in this case,
wherever the user taps on the screen.
If the virtual world is large, it
may just be too much work to walk places.
Teleportation is a great way to make it easier to get around
faster and with less effort.
Since the boundary between the experience on screen
and in real life are starting to blend,
it is important to think about how to do so
without confusing the user.
Physical boundaries can prevent the user
from entering virtual places.
Virtual boundaries can cause the user
to accidentally exit virtual places, which
we will cover in the designing for virtual boundaries episode.
To create phenomenal experiences,
you must be mindful of the boundaries that exist
and handle them seamlessly.
Visit our Google+ community and join us in our journey.
We are excited to see what you will build with Project Tango.
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