A tongue-in-cheek exploration into bad interfaces that translate existing design patterns into virtual reality. A 360º WebVR experience that can be played in the browser or on your phone via a Google Cardboard or equivalent.

I worked with a group to create the concept and ideas for the interactions. I also provided most of the visual assets. Nate Parrott coded all of it using three.js.




  • User Experience
  • Visual Design


Intrusive Popups

In the field of UX, there has been a trend of tracking eye movements—they tell you when a person is paying attention to a certain part of the design, often signaling your user’s intent and concentration. Why not create an object that requires you to physically look at the interactive aspect in order to manipulate it?

The user has to navigate their gaze to the cross in the top left corner in order to close the pop up.

The ‘gaze’ is a 3D pointer that extrudes out of the center of the user’s vision. It acts the same as a mouse would on a regular desktop computer—a design pattern that most users will be familiar with. Similarly, the cross in the top left corner is reminiscent of many apps on mobile phones and desktop computers.


Social Media Feeds

What does the neverending stream of statuses look like in virtual reality? Now that you aren't restricted by a screen, you can have more space to view all of these status updates.

New posts in the feed appear wherever you look—it’s impossible to stay away from being connected to your social media. There is no way to turn this off and there is no way to close out any of them. This part of the experience is a look into how much more pervasive messaging can be when you’re put into VR.


Surrounded by News

With virtual reality, we no longer are restricted by the edges of the screen. Why not play with space and have multiple screens for media that work best on a tabular surface?

You are simply surrounded by flat 2D planes with news articles on them. They curve around you, so no matter where you look, there is a new thing to look at. Unfortunately, these news pieces are not necessarily the news stories many people want to be hearing about.


Natural Design Patterns

How can we harness known behaviors in order to make it clear what to do?

While looking at content, a pop up comes up that requires users to shake their head to dismiss it. We learn from a very young age that nodding your head means ‘yes’, while shaking your head from side to side means ‘no’. Why can’t we take advantage of this common movement and make it an intuitive command for virtual reality? However, this quickly becomes annoying and even painful, especially when connected to multiple intrusive advertisements.


VR Meme Environments

 With the prevalance of viral sites like Staggering Beauty, what kind of weird adventures could you have in VR?

Things tilt and distort within the scene. The horizon line itself rotates. It’s an interesting test to see how long you can take it. This part of the sequence is meant to make you take the headset off completely—almost like a viral dare challenge that may end up making people sick.



Designed by me. Made using Semplice and custom code by me. Font used is Aileron by dot colon. Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo.