Planar or Spatial: Exploring Design Aspects and Challenges for Presentations in Virtual Reality with No-coding Interface

2025-10-19

AI Summary

High development barriers and time consumption hinder the widespread adoption of VR demonstrations. This paper introduces VRStory, a user-centered, no-code authoring tool that integrates preconfigured VR assets, modular scene layouts, visual navigation logic design, and automated resource generation to enable rapid construction of immersive demonstrations. Through systematic analysis of mainstream VR authoring software, expert interviews, and a 12-participant user study, we derive a five-dimensional design framework and identify four core challenges. Results indicate that while users acknowledge VR’s immersive potential, they strongly prefer retaining planar, static information structures to balance cognitive efficiency and accessibility. Our findings reveal a fundamental trade-off between spatial representation and planar cognition, offering empirical evidence and actionable design guidelines for next-generation VR authoring tools that reconcile innovation with usability.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning
• Computer Vision: Visual Reasoning & Symbolic Representations

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

The proliferation of virtual reality (VR) has led to its increasing adoption as an immersive medium for delivering presentations, distinct from other VR experiences like games and 360-degree videos by sharing information in richly interactive environments. However, creating engaging VR presentations remains a challenging and time-consuming task for users, hindering the full realization of VR presentation's capabilities. This research aims to explore the potential of VR presentation, analyze users' opinions, and investigate these via providing a user-friendly no-coding authoring tool. Through an examination of popular presentation software and interviews with seven professionals, we identified five design aspects and four design challenges for VR presentations. Based on the findings, we developed VRStory, a prototype for presentation authoring without coding to explore the design aspects and strategies for addressing the challenges. VRStory offers a variety of predefined and customizable VR elements, as well as modules for layout design, navigation control, and asset generation. A user study was then conducted with 12 participants to investigate their opinions and authoring experience with VRStory. Our results demonstrated that, while acknowledging the advantages of immersive and spatial features in VR, users often have a consistent mental model for traditional 2D presentations and may still prefer planar and static formats in VR for better accessibility and efficient communication. We finally shared our learned design considerations for future development of VR presentation tools, emphasizing the importance of balancing of promoting immersive features and ensuring accessibility.

Problem

• Exploring design aspects and challenges for VR presentations
• Developing no-coding authoring tools for VR presentation creation
• Investigating user preferences between planar and spatial VR formats

Innovation

• No-coding authoring tool for VR presentations
• Predefined customizable VR elements and modules
• Balancing immersive features with accessibility