UX camp Europe 2023

Speaker at UX barcamp in Berlin.

Summary

At UXcamp Europe 2023 I prepared, pitched, and run a public session on “Intro to VR Design.” I talked about use cases and design challenges for VR experiences, demonstrated a VR game, prototyped live in VR, and held a Q&A session.

Audience

~20 people

Duration

45 minutes

Background

I was lucky enough to get one of 500 tickets to the UXcamp Europe 2023 in Berlin.

Day one
Day one

Pitch

On the first event day, I understood the concept of a barcamp: each participant could give their own session in the form of a talk, discussion, or a workshop of any level of professionalism! Throughout the day, many people encouraged me to talk about design in virtual reality as soon as they found out I was a VR designer. And I made up my mind. After the Saturday party, I prepared a presentation overnight, pitched it on the second day, and got a time slot! I was surprised when despite 8 other highly interesting sessions in the same time slot, I had about 20 people in the audience.

My session on day two

Session

I started by explaining the acronyms AR, AV, VR, MR, and XR using the reality-virtuality continuum. I then explained in simple terms the differences between flat and spatial experiences and gave the 5 most popular use cases of using virtual reality with video examples. After the positive part with use cases, I listed the most pressing problems for VR users and VR designers. For those UX professionals who were interested in moving to VR, I talked about the design process of creating VR experiences. Finally, I strapped on my Meta Quest 2, opened up Bezi, and created a simple prototype of a workplace in VR. With some time to spare, I also showed the Holonautic’s Hand Physics Lab as an example of a quality VR experience with hand tracking. After the demonstration, I gave a Q&A session. Several people from my audience approached me after the session with individual questions.

My presentation slides

Learnings

  1. If the presentation can be shared, add a QR code with a link to slides at the end and announce at the beginning that the slides will be available for download so the audience can focus on the session and not be distracted by taking photos of the slides.
  2. Rehearse the pitch and talk aloud several times from beginning to end to make it a coherent story and catch possible technical issues.
  3. Take at least 15 minutes before the session to connect to the network on the spot, open everything that needs to be shown, and do a dry run.
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