Zero Days VR and Notes on Blindness are in my opinion perfect examples of how VR on mobile devices should be made. One of the main concerns of mobile VR is that due to the technical limitations of the VR device and phone explorable experiences are hard to make. experiences that take full advantage of murray’s rule of spatial is hard to perfectly portray in such situations. Instead the experience should take the player on a journey rather than let the player find the journey in the experience.
Zero Days VR takes a documentation approach where the user travels through digital cyberspace with narration of what they are seeing. This linear journey really takes full effect of border of illusion where instead the user only listens to the narration, the narrations complements the visual presented to the user and engages the user in trying to tie in the narration with what is going on visually. One good example of this would be when the user is presented with a virus moving through circuits, it look like the virus is dodging obstacles but when the narrator explains that the virus is looking for the actual target it adds a whole new meaning to the visuals. The only thing that was bad in the experience was the lack of spatial affordance of the VR. everything was in front and looking around did not provide much
Notes on blindness also does something similar where the narrations and visuals go hand and hand to make a enjoyable experience. border of illusion, mechanics to simulate physical acts was really present through the experience. it gave the user a sense of what was being discussed through its visual presentation where blindness and how a blind person navigates is beautifully presented. using particle effect to simulate footsteps making vague figures of people and world building through narrating and visualizing every single detain really gave the illusion of a believable world. The only thing that hindered the experience was that towards the second half the narrations didn’t slow down and didn’t let the user absorb all the detail before moving on to the next one.