Designing Usable Information Display in Immersive Virtual Environments
Shan Jiang, Hyowon Lee, Brendan D. Rooney · 2025
One of the characteristics offered in the Virtual Reality (VR) interaction is the way the information is displayed in the VR environment: labels, icons, text and instructions are usually associated with or attached to objects in VR (diegetic approach) but a unique affordance of the medium allows such information to be shown at any fixed location, independent of the user’s viewpoint (non-diegetic approach). There are a number of design decisions that need to be made in these two approaches, yet very little literature exists to support such decisions. In this study, we develop simple VR prototype systems that feature both diegetic and non-diegetic approaches in information display, and conduct usability testing with 15 participants. From this study, we identify a few potentially significant factors that future interaction designers will need to consider in designing usable information display in VR: the user’s preference changing from non-diegetic to diegetic approaches as their level of familiarity/proficiency improves corresponding to their wishes from simpler, clearer and more consistent displays to more realistic and immersive ways of display; the strategies needed for making the sizes of labels/text attached to distant objects more legible or readable for diegetic displays; and the trade-offs between access to information and visual obstruction for non-diegetic displays. Unique affordances of VR interaction mean that the extensive body of knowledge in the form of design principles, guidelines and heuristics available today is not sufficient to support the design of truly usable VR experiences. We expect that the findings in this study will help the VR interaction designers more easily create usable VR experiences in the future.