© courtesy Nonobject
Branko Lukic’s studio set out to redesign the headset as a side project. What they came up with is quietly revolutionary.
The Oculus Rift is an ergonomic masterpiece. It fits over anyone’s face, aligning two lenses over every set of eyes. It spins two headphones over your ears, distributing a full pound of weight on your head. The bundled handheld controllers are equally impressive, creating the sensation of grasping real objects. And yet the Oculus Rift still hasn’t had its iPod moment–the design breakthrough that would allow anyone to use it without minutes of apologetic explanation, several micro adjustments to the straps, and the sacrifice of a few strands of hair.
Branko Lukic, a former lead industrial designer at both Ideo and Frog, who since founded Nonobject, thinks he can do better. His studio designed the hit Bluetooth speaker the UE Boom, which reimagined a rapidly obsolescent gadget as something that might age proudly, like an heirloom watch or jacket. And for the past eight months, as an unpaid side project for their own amusement, Nonobject’s designers have focused on fixing the pain points of VR and AR in a project called Airhead. Their goal? To make this new frontier “as comfortable as possible.” That includes improving physical comfort, increasing social acceptance, and rethinking the intuitiveness of headsets.
“As we look around, we see our industry is doing what it does time and time again. It gets into tech gadgets driven by technology, not thinking about the human,” says Lukic. “A ‘wearable’ is not just something you strap on your head. This project attempts to open the avenues, and inspire the industry, to leap forward farther than we have today.”
Nonobject shared its designs exclusively with Co.Design in the hope that the industry would steal these open-source ideas and move AR and VR forward. Note that they are not just concepts and renderings, but prototyped headset and controller bodies that can accommodate the Oculus spec. In other words, these ideas aren’t mere fantasy. They could all be feasibly mass-produced soon, if not tomorrow.
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© courtesy Nonobject
SPLIT
All VR headsets go over your head. You need to lift them on and off, like scuba masks. It’s not impossible, but no one would call it preferable, either. It’s bad for your hair, and it makes you feel vulnerable.
Split is a VR headset that, rather than slipping over your head, splits in the middle to wrap around it. The actual eyepiece is cut down the center and attached by magnets (and, perhaps, a clasp as well for more active use). All you have to do is pull it apart and the headset comes off. And thanks to the fact that the Rift uses two lenses and LCDs, it’s feasible to crack those components right down the middle–at least for any VR headset that doesn’t require a full, single-piece phone inside.
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© courtesy Nonobject
GRASP
Nonobject also looked at VR controllers. Grasp is its response to the lauded Oculus Touch, which attempted to mimic the experience of grasping real objects.
Without getting too into the weeds about the exact ergonomic and tracking considerations at play, Grasp encompasses two great ideas. First is that it actually grabs the hand with the equivalent of fabric brass knuckles. This means you can do something impossible inside the Touch–actually throw a virtual object (without chucking the real controller across the room). “We had this Frisbee test,” says Killpatrick. “We put the Frisbee test against all the controllers out there. You can’t do it. It’d fly away.”
These soft knuckles weigh on just the right part of your hand to avoid fatigue. To ensure a proper fit, their second great idea comes into play: All you do is pull down on a strap that runs down through the Grasp hardware, and they tighten.
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© courtesy Nonobject
STONE
“It’s almost like we’re creating the first tools in this new space. New tools out of stone,” says Killpatrick. So “stone” made a great name for Nonobject’s proposed creative tool, a touch-sensitive . . . stone . . . you hold in your hand. “For this, we focused mostly on how you perform creative tasks in new ways. Sculpting. Video editing. This could be expanded into a whole range of tools.” Whereas the controllers for the HTC Vive are fit with triggers that make them feel more like guns, Stone, accompanied with an airbrush tool in your other hand, lets you draw intricate structures at a very granular layer.
Of course, the simpler design solution would be no controller at all. But Nonobject, playing with a Leap Motion gesture controller, found that was a bad idea. “We were all like, ‘of course, we don’t need a controller!’–only to learn that we do need something tangible in our hands,” says Lukic. “There’s no tactility in the air. You definitely need some tactility.”
Source: Co.Design