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

TL;DR

The paper investigates how to design and author VR presentations that balance immersive, spatial capabilities with accessibility for non-technical users. Through a four-stage approach—background analysis, expert formative study, prototyping VRStory (a no-code authoring tool), and a 12-participant user study—the authors identify five design aspects and four challenges specific to VR presentations. They present VRStory as a modular platform with Stage Editing, Interactive Layout, Navigation Design, and ML-Assisted Asset Management to address these challenges, and report positive user reception while highlighting persistent preferences for traditional 2D layouts in some contexts. The work offers practical design considerations and outlines future directions, including improved content generation, XR extension, and broader accessibility, aimed at making VR presentations more feasible and effective across domains.

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.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Examples of the presentation tools in four classified groups in our study: (a) Keynote, (b) PowerPoint, (c) Pitch, (d) SlideCamp, (e) Prezi, (f) VideoScribe, (g) Gather, and (h) Spatial.
• Figure 2: The background study identified five design aspects for VR presentation: 1) Elements serve as visual aids to convey information, including commonly used elements in traditional 2D presentations (blue area), elements used in VR presentations extending these 2D elements (green area), and unique elements specific to VR presentations (yellow area). 2) Layouts describe the geometry relationships among the elements in one slide, including four base layouts that can be composed to suit different purposes of the slides, and spatial layout that can be composed by horizontal and vertical layouts. 3) Navigation rules the methods one slide can move to other slides. 4) Animations and 5) Interactions are complementary aspects that can enhance the engagement and experience of presentations. Design Aspects that are supported by VRStory with customization are marked with green marks and predefined features offered by VRStory are marked with yellow marks.
• Figure 3: The prototype has three scenes with navigation buttons and two style transfer backgrounds (a, c). Design elements in each scene: (a) panels with switchable texts and images; (b) three text-generated images and a playable narration; and (c) a video with a play button.
• Figure 4: VRStory consists of four editors, namely: (A) the Scene Editor, which enables users to add and customize stage elements and utilize layout templates and media assets; (B) the Asset Editor, which facilitates the upload of users' own media assets and allows the creation of new images, texts, and audios using ML methods; (C) the Layout Editor, which generates layout placeholders for consumption in the Scene Editor, enabling the easy layout of stage elements in different positions; and (D) the Navigation Editor, which provides users with an intuitive interface for designing and visualizing navigation controls across all stages.
• Figure 5: Questionnaire Results: RS1 to RS5 for users' general feedback for each editing modules in VRStory; RS6 to RS9 for users' general experience and attitudes towards VRStory (5-point Likert scale, 1=strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree).