Immersion through UI
Nigel Kershaw, lead designer at Secret Sorcery, visited the University of Bolton to give a talk on virtual reality, and the importance of UI design. Nigel talked about how the UI of many popular games wouldn’t translate well into virtual reality, due to their non-diegetic design, however, games that use a HUD, like the Halo series, would work well as they use diegetic design.
Diegetic and non-diegetic both originate from film audio. Diegetic means that it’s part of a scene, but non-diegetic means that it’s not. In the games industry, Dead Space would have a diegetic UI as everything is displayed on the character, whereas games like World of Warcraft use non-diegetic HUD elements to display possible actions for the player (Deshmuk, 2017). Diegetic UI is more commonly used to create a sense of immersion for the player by reducing the amount of onscreen distractions, whereas non-diegetic is used to give the player more freedom when viewing the 3D space due to the UI being static.
The other two was of utilising the UI is by using spatial and meta design. “UI elements presented in the game's 3D space with or without being an entity of the actual game world” (Andrews, 2014) is a rough definition of Spatial design. An example of this would be the characters outline in Left 4 Dead or the green hue applied when using the V.A.T system in Fallout 3. Spatial design is sometimes used to provide information to the player that should be aware to the character, thus sustaining the overall flow of gameplay.
Meta design is similar to spatial design, but rather than being within the 3D space of the game, it sits on the 3D plane of the HUD. The most common example is the blood splatters of the Call of Duty series when your character takes damage (Stonehouse, 2014). This is used to register to the player that they are receiving damage, it’s also effective when trying to build a sense of immersion for the player, especially in FPS games, as it seems more immediate when compared to a health bar on the HUD.
Deshmukh, I. (2010) Creating immersive experiences with diegetic interfaces. Cooper. [Online]. Available from: https://www.cooper.com/journal/2010/8/diagetic_interfaces. [Accessed 31 March 2017]
Andrews, M. (2010) Game UI Discoveries: What Players Want. Gamasutra. [Online]. Available from: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4286/game_ui_discoveries_what_players_.php?print=1. [Accessed 31 March 2017]
Stonehouse, A. (2014) User interface design in video games. Gamasutra. [Online]. Available from http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AnthonyStonehouse/20140227/211823/User_interface_design_in_video_games.php. [Accessed 31 March 2017]