Different strokes for different folks - Figuring out how to sketch for VR
Coming from a 2D background, it's definitely different sketching with a whole nother dimension to think about.
I decided to further iterate on my team's Make-athon project and move onto the ideation part, which for me usually means sketching. Normally, I break out the old paper and pen and just start scribbling something that usually resembles what's in my head, but does this work for the 3D space?
I did some research and found a few different strategies based on how others are solving for how to sketch for VR...
Draw it out
However, before I start getting my ideas on paper, I decided to figure what my scenarios would be for this scene as its not just a nice linear story. I created a quick flow chart to help me see the basic flows a user might take:
Scene - Code of Conduct: Be Kind - user flows/decisions
Now that I have an idea of what my users most likely options are, I'll get to sketching them out!
Storyboarding
I've done storyboarding before to define past use-cases, so I decided to first try tackling sketching old school by mocking up a storyboard - comic strip style. Here's a great article on Storyboarding in UX Design to get you started, if you've never done it before.
Here's the first pass at sketching for the scene using a storyboard (don't worry, I'm not going to quit my job to become an illustrator.)
While it's fun and reminds me of my days reading Garfield, storyboarding in this format focuses more on how the scene is shot, which isn't relevant in VR, as we don't know the user's perspective. Plus, it is made for a linear storyline, I had to draw out each scenario on a different board.
Let's try something else to start thinking more three dimensionally...
Setting the Scene
I found another great post about Storyboarding in Virtual Reality, Vincent gives some good insight into accounting for Field of View (FOV) in the article and defines the "area of interest" for a user when they enter the scene --understanding what's comfortable taking stereoscopic depth perception into account.
As my scene is very simple, it didn't take much to draw it out in this format.
I like how this form of sketching let's me quickly share my idea with others, more time and effort was required for the comic style storyboard. This type of sketching gives you a great holistic view of the scene, however it doesn't help me tell the story.
While this style is good at understanding the big picture, what if you want to focus on the finer points of the scene?
Onto another style that allows for more detail, but in 3D...
Sketching in 3d
Without going into 3D to sketch in 3D, how can we better visualize 360 in a 2D format?
I found another interesting post about how to Draw Sketches For Virtual Reality Like A Pro, he uses a 360 panorama grid to align his sketches to a wide angle view and throws it into a 360 photo viewer to see how it would layout in 3D.
As I almost failed Drawing 101 because of perspective, and my sketch didn't follow the guidelines exactly, so I wasn't sure how it would turn out, but I was pleasantly surprised! (Below) You can see it's a pretty quick way to get your sketches into 360 and begin to understand the scene in a 3D space.
If you are like me, and perspective isn't your thing, I also found a 360 photoshop plugin that lets you draw freely and preview the 360 image inside Photoshop itself. It works off of a cube layout, that you can just design or paste your sketch into the appropriate squares.
Or, this might be a better tool if you're wanting a higher fidelity comp and already working in Photoshop (or a similar tool.)
So in Conclusion...
I personally think if you're just trying to quickly layout a scene, and explain it to someone else, Vincent's FOV sketch template is the fastest, and easiest way to do that.
When you're trying to understand the details of the scene in relation to how it lives in a 360 bubble I was pleasantly surprised how easy the 360 sketching grid was to draw and throw into a 3D viewer.
Whereas if you're trying to tell a story, storyboarding is your best bet, but even then it's a bit cumbersome requiring multiple storylines.
In order to tell the whole story we're going to have to explore how to interact with our sketches and ideas, how to prototype in VR... on to my next post.