Description
Neoverse is a Twitter client re-imagined for mobile VR, offering an easier, more natural, and exciting new way to use Twitter. Traditional 2D Twitter apps are typically designed for mouse/keyboard and touch devices, resulting in designs that are limited by explicit user input. For example, when a user taps on an image thumbnail in a tweet, the 2D app expands the size of the image, but until the user taps the thumbnail, the app has no way of determining the user’s focus or intention. In addition to designing for explicit input, Virtual Reality provides us with the opportunity to design experiences that support implicit input, such as head and eye movement, resulting in designs that are more natural and easier to use compared to their 2D counterpart. Applying that same example to VR, when a user looks at an image thumbnail in a tweet, the content can respond automatically by enlarging the image while hiding any content that was previously in focus. Simply by looking around in the VR environment, content can automatically optimize it’s presentation based on the user’s focus, resulting in an easier, more natural way to use Twitter.
Unique environments are another exciting aspect of Neoverse. Twitter’s website allows you to customize the design of your timeline, but in VR your design is all around you. Neoverse will allow you to choose the environment in which you use Twitter. For this demo version, two unique environments will be created. Additional environments will be provided in the full version.
For milestone 2, I've provided screenshots showing the process of logging into Twitter from Neoverse, as well as screenshots showing a glimpse of the first environment. For milestone 3, I intend to provide screenshots and a video of how a user views and interacts with tweets from the user's Twitter timeline.
Challenges
Tweet Publishing: To allow the user to engage with other uses and publish tweets, Neoverse will be tackling the problem of text input on the GearVR, using a combination of the GearVR sensors and touchpad. The current approach is to use an on-screen keyboard in conjunction with the crosshair. With this approach, the user can comfortably enter text by looking at a key on the virtual keyboard and tapping the touchpad.
Video and Web Presentation: Some tweets can contain video and web URLs, but due to time constraints, support for viewing video and web pages will not be implemented in this version. If the user views a tweet that contains a video or web URL that they’re interested in, they may feel tempted to leave Neoverse and switch to another device to view the content. To mitigate this problem, Neoverse will integrate support for popular Read-It-Later apps to allow the user to bookmark these tweets so they can feel comfortable continuing without having to worry about missing any content they’re interested in.
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