Design Principles for Room-Scale Virtual Reality: A Design Experiment in Three Dimensions

Virtual reality hardware, and software tools that support developing for virtual reality applications, are rapidly maturing. Specifically, room-scale virtual reality hardware that lets users walk around in virtual environments is becoming increasingly easier to purchase and adopt. With this follows a need for researching potential design theories for how to design and evaluate this class of systems. We contribute with a nascent design theory containing a high-level conceptual framework of dimensions and design principles of how to design room-scale virtual reality applications that create engaging user experiences. We identify meta-requirements from kernel theories from the human-computer interaction paradigm and evaluate two different VR artefacts and their applicability. Two central, higher level design principles are derived from the evaluation.