In this presentation Aki Jarvinen, Senior Experience Researcher, Ph.D, Digital Catapult, author of the report The Immersive Audience Journey summarises the report’s main findings and explains why he encourages creators to think about the immersive experiences beyond the story, "Framing immersive experiences under the banner of 'storytelling' in the age of ‘peak TV’ and omnipresent story content is not necessarily a working strategy. Emphasising the experiences seems to differentiate immersive. Immersive producers need to think how to blend production activities into marketing, and adopt holistic thinking around audience engagement. Community building and pre event launch activities can significantly increase awareness and facilitating post event activities contribute to loyalty".
 
Download the full report here
 
The original need for this research emerged from the question of audience. There was a recognition that we lacked insight regarding what is immersive audience, or what are immersive audiences.
 
What is immersive?
 
Whereas producers tend to associate the term with particular technologies, audiences tend to associate it with stepping into a responsive and alternative reality that has been artificially created for them.
 
Immersive technologies are typically good at creating these kind of experiences. So immersive is many things, and can be created using a variety of technologies. 
 
Our analysis highlights a common, high level customer journey map approach which has traditionally been employed in marketing, service and design thinking contexts, but we want to encourage more thinking about this throughout the production process. 

If immersive producers are able to leverage this more holistic approach, we think that it contributes to a more structured planning of the project which puts it in a better place to succeed. There's so many things grabbing our attention, so alternative distribution approaches are important. One definition from service design literature says that a human centered tool, like the journey map not only includes steps where a customer is interacting with the company, but also reveals all the key steps of the experience. So journey maps help us define gaps in customer experiences, and explore potential solutions.
 
The Unfolding Immersive Audience Journey in Phases:

Phase 0: Segmenting Immersive Audiences
 
What we are finding is that the immersive audience is a collection of subsets of audiences, ranging from festival goers who happen across an immersive production exhibited in that festival, whether it's online or location based. Immersive audiences include gamers who are into VR. They include casual AR mobile AR audiences, but also more niche cohorts that might be more profitable and engaged like secret cinema enthusiasts. immersive theater enthusiasts, even VR documentary enthusiasts. The key thing to understand is that the context defines the audience for any given production. So for instance, if it's a location based experience where is it delivered, exhibited, but also on which digital platforms, as the device might dictate and shape your audience, but also social dynamics. So is it something that enables friends and families to go together?
 
Already we are seeing some clever solutions for post Covid-19 engagement that facilitate for instance, a family or a household come in at the same time to a location based solution.
 
Phase 1: Reaching Audience Awareness

This is the phase where a potential audience member becomes aware that an immersive production exists, which requires promotion, marketing, and community building. And the key takeaway, I think, from this phase is that immersive productions are challenging to market by traditional means.
 
In the age of peak TV, where there is an overwhelming amount of streaming television storytelling format content, framing your experience, as the peak in immersive storytelling is not necessarily the most strategically sound choice.
 
Instead you need to emphasize the unique component of your immersive experience. And that tends to be immersion, whether it's the sense of presence that you feel through, let's say, VR, or the physical set, with projections and props. However, the paradox here is that creating awareness around this isn't very easy to do with traditional marketing means. It’s  hard to communicate what is special about an immersive experience via print, or video marketing.  You need to be creative.

My one takeaway would be that you should show audiences engaging with the experience in a unique way in the promotion video.  Don’t just show the visuals of the experience because that also factors to the next phase which is consideration.
 
Phase 2: Audience considerations
 
After becoming aware, your potential audience starts to weigh up whether to attend, or participate, engage, and pay for your experience.  Managing their expectations and almost literally telling them the degree of expected interaction is very important. There is also a duty of care, to show that you will be on-boarding them through this and taking care of them during it as well. This may require that you lower the threshold of attendance explicitly in certain cohorts, and this relates to technology acceptance, so how comfortable people are putting on a headset or engaging with a technology that they're not familiar with in their everyday sort of media, and technology repertoire.  Multiple things go into those considerations, including the genre and type of content and experience.  For example, to engage a broader audience in the thrill seeking aspect of that experience, you might engage your comic lead in your communication and that just might work for you that they can connect with that certain niche.
 
Putting your production out there takes time, money and resourcing.  You need to have people on hand to help participants go through that experience. This is one thing that I feel requires further development on the digital side of things, because people are just not comfortable trying to engage with new equipment like headsets on their own. So how could you facilitate that process? How do you make it as easy as possible to get on board. Also, can you draw attention away from the technology towards the experience itself?  That's another element that you want, might want to do.
 
Phase 3: Evaluating Audience Experience
 
The decision for an audience member to attend or not to attend might contribute directly to your bottom line and your opportunity to continue the work. Therefore, you need to be aware of the different dynamics that go into these decisions. For instance, the size of a market that you are targeting is one important factor. At Digital Catapult we're trying to get more actual data about Immersive Audiences size, demographics and limits to help guide startups.
 
Important factors include price and location. A location can be a platform too. So if an AR mobile experience is only available to Android or iOS, then that shapes your audience. A certain kind of headset shapes your audience and price factors into that too, as well as more qualitative characteristics such as technology acceptance in a certain demographic for instance, or the fear of missing out regarding this experience, which might be something that you want to deliberately build. But there are other considerations, like the expected level of interaction.  The whole point of an immersive theatre piece might be to take it out from the theatre to the streets and make it a bit more chaotic if you will. But then some of the audience members complained that they didn't always see all the actors and therefore didn't always know where to direct their attention. So if your target participants are more used to traditional theatre where you have a good view to the stage and all the techniques that have to do with lighting and drawing audience's attention to this on the stage, immersive disruption can violate those expectations. If it does that audiences will leave unsatisfied and won’t recommend the experience to others.

We have a tool available to help you test your interfaces.
 
If the intention is create an experience which gives participants the option to make choices, ideally they will then come out of the experience feeling that it was unique and personalised. But people bring their own personal context, habits and expectation to every experience that will shape how fully they interact with the piece.  So if there's a lot of self-interaction, there might be people who just are not familiar with those conventions of interaction, and they might come out of the experience by feeling that they didn't get as much as somebody else. That might feel like a design failure.
 
User testing is a skill set and a set of know how that small studios don’t necessarily possess, so it tends to get de prioritised in production. In the interviews that we conducted, nobody discounted the need and potential usefulness of user research and testing, but because they weren't well versed in the methodologies, production itself tends to take over, with ad hoc user tests conducted very close to the end. And that also means that their methodology might not be entirely sound, which then might lead to skewed results. For example, the testing cohort might not be representative of the target audience. So it's just another example where time and resource needs to be allocated early on to this and there needs to be somebody leading on it as well.
 
In larger organisations like museums, there might already be a culture of user research. So, they have experts in house who gather user insights from past projects, to inform a new project and then advocate those insights along the journey.
 
And they have a very good sort of set structure of where at which phases is production tested, and how that feeds into the process. So we hope to assist people find these relatively accessible methodologies and tools.
 
But it is very challenging to be able to assess if there's any longer term impact of an experience, particularly in terms of behaviour change over time.
 
Phase 4: Satisfaction and Loyalty

This is another moment of truth, satisfaction and loyalty. It’s very important especially if you hope people will re-engage or recommend the experience to others. So, if you want to create so called organic growth word of mouth around your production, then you should think about how to facilitate that.
 
This is where community management comes into the picture. To create a community around your product, where people share stories about using the product and experiencing it. And they've tried to leverage this by engaging the community and listening to them, and so on so forth. But again, somebody has to do, perhaps even a small team, and allocating that responsibility can be challenging, but down the line, it does pay off in most cases.
 
Another thing to consider is merchandising. This approach has been tried and tested in the amusement park industry. Merchandise can reinforce a participatory experience.  By buying a T shirt, an object, a piece of memorabilia that they can take home, audience members might also contribute to that word of mouth.
 
And the other benefit from thinking about and planning for merchandising is that it creates another complimentary revenue stream for your ticket or download revenues. Again, this is something that needs to be planned in order to be effectively executed.
 
TEMPLATES

This audience journey is an approach that can be applied in practice, and can inform your thinking about your production in a holistic manner. So therefore, we have included two templates to the report, and also they will be available to download separately as printouts.
 
Template 1:
The audience journey template which illustrates the various touch points to consider from the point of view of the responsibilities and stakeholders involved in different phases of the journey.
 
Template 2:
In a 2nd template the user journey is also mapped from an emotional perspective, to help you think in a more deliberate way about how to take your audience from being indifferent, or casually interested, let's say, to being excited and waiting to see your production and then also possibly eager to re-engage or hear about what you're going to do next.

Download the full report here

Jarvinen, Aki. 2020. The Immersive Audience Journey: Insights and perspectives on immersive art, culture, & entertainment. edited by Digital Catapult. U.K.: Digital Catapult/YouTube.

These heuristics were then mapped thematically, and those groupings were evaluated in the 1st instance by 3 design experts.  Following further adjustments in response to this 1st round of feedback the heuristic themes were re-evaluated, this time by 5 experts, to identify any doubling up, or lack of relevance.  The heuristics (14 at this point) were then tested in practice during the design of two AR applications.  The experiential insight gained through application revealed a few more inconsistencies and overlap, which inspired the researchers to streamline them further into the 9 heuristics presented above, which also underwent a 3rd round of evaluation by 5 expert reviewers to assess inter-item consistency and inter-rater reliability before being finalised.  

Endsley, T.C., Sprehn, K.A., Brill, R.M., Ryan, K.J., Vincent, E.C. and Martin, J.M., 2017, September. Augmented reality design heuristics: Designing for dynamic interactions. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 2100-2104). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.

Lance Weiler, founding member and director of the Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab shares findings from the labs re-imagining of the work of Arthur Conan Doyle titled Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things, a prototype that had 1,200 collaborators from 60+ countries working across 70 events to create a massive connected crime scene.
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Main Takeaways:
Identifies 4 Immersive Participation Design Theme Principles
1) Trace: Provide a way for people to leave their mark/personalise the experience
2) Grant Agency: Shifting between individual and group tasks helps to promote, as well as reinforce a sense of individual agency.
3) Thematic Frame: Everything is so much easier when you're working with a known starting point e.g. a popular source IP
4) Serendipity Management: Let things evolve/Aim to show, not tell and leave gaps for the audience's own interpretations.

In addition he recommends dividing participants into groups of 5 - 6 people
​
The Digital Storytelling lab kicked off a prototype about a year ago called Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things and it's kind of like peanut butter and chocolate right? This idea of mixing Holmes and the IoT (the juxtaposition is consciously unexpected).
 
Because what was fascinating about Arthur Conan Doyle's work is that he was writing about emergent technologies that nobody knew about outside of certain small circles: non contaminated crime scenes, ballistics and different types of blood tests.  Law enforcement was reading that and saying, wow, these are really good ideas, we should adopt these. 
 
And so in a lot of ways, Arthur Conan Doyle was starting to influence fact. ... and I love this quote by Arthur C. Clarke.
 
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
 
And I think the Internet of Things is very much like that for most people. ..all these common objects within our lives connected to networks seems like magic. 

We also wanted to experiment with this idea of copyleft, so we made the whole experience open to whoever wants to be a part of it, all over the world. It's released under creative commons, share alike license, so people can commercialize whatever they create within it as long as they give back the code base and share their learnings.
 
Taking this original source material from Arthur Conan Doyle, and using it as this fertile playground to start to experiment with what we could do was a large, massive global storytelling experiment.

THE GLOBAL STORYTELLING EXPERIENCE
 
The experience starts when people go to the source material.  We ask them to find an object from one of Arthur Conan Doyle stories and adapt it using physical computing sensors to create this enchanted object that's intended to be something that they can use as a way to tell a story.
 
We didn't plan to use IOT at the start. Instead, we started for about six months through a series of meetups, and did everything in physical form, paper testing.
 
SHORT
Our analog prototype consisted of four key areas. It would take about 90 minutes to run it.

TEAMS OF 5 or 6
5 - 6 is optimum.
When` we had less than five, certain personalities would dominate and people would have a miserable time. And then when it was too large, it started becoming almost like a consensus vortex where nothing ever really happened.
 
TASKS
1. Create a crime scene.
We hand each team a roll of masking tape, and say okay, now go out and create a crime scene with your fellow teammates.

2. Create clues
When they came back we would lay down Brown. paper and tell them to empty their pockets in their bags and define three things that they thought were really interesting to tell a story with.
 
And then they would just trace those things. So if they had, you know, sunglasses or their phone, or whatever it was, they would trace the outline of it. And they’d do that individually.
 
3. Mix it up
Then we ask them to step back, pick three things that aren't yours, rip them out, cut them out, and now you have them. Go back to any of the bodies except the one that your team just created and place these objects with purpose in another crime scene, and be creative with them.

4. Set the scene
a) 1st individually

That famous phrase by Ernest Hemingway: "For sale. baby shoes never worn" a very evocative statement, that's this idea of generative, flash fiction.
 
We gave each team a packet of post it notes and some pens. You can go around, you can pick up that phone on the ground to hear the last voicemail message from a crying ex girlfriend. If you see glasses, you can leave teeth marks on broken lenses.  But you do it as an individual. The only rule is you can't make any changes to your own crime scene, your own body, your team's body.

b) Next collaboratively
 
And then they come back and we'd say, Okay, now you're a team again. Go back to the dead body crime scene that you originally created, but you're going to realize that there are all kinds of clues there now.

5. "Solve" the crime
Now we'd challenge them to be a collaborative Sherlock Holmes, by making up a story about what happened here. They could pick and chose what they wanted to respond to. But then they crafted these narratives about the scene that were incredibly dynamic and they did it very quickly.  
 

SCALING THIS EXPERIENCE
So we workshopped what to do through a series of meetups and then with a global community, which probably came close to 2000 collaborators from 60 different countries. Last year, there were 70, self organized events all over the world. There's been a ton already this year.

 
FOUR DESIGN PRINCIPLES emerged from this prototype. And remember we tested this thing all over the world.
 
1. TRACE
People really responded well, whenever they could see some element of themselves within the story, you know. And what's interesting is when we first started this, the very first prototypes, we thought we'll write the stories will populate the crime scenes.  We'll lay out the bodies and then people can come in and be Sherlock Holmes and Watson and they'll love it.

But what was actually more engaging was when they were creating everything themselves, and we were just letting it happen. So that one step of the trace was really important where they could see a contribution of themselves within the story.

2. GRANT AGENCY
Breaking the event up from a group task to an individual task and back and forth led to these really these potent moments that allowed people to feel like they actually had an impact over what was going on.

They didn't feel like they were just following somebody else who might be a dominant personality within a team. And that was that was interesting.
 
3. USE AN EVOCATIVE/ACCESSIBLE THEMATIC FRAME

Most people probably know Sherlock Holmes, even if they don't they know what a detective mystery is. And if they see a body on the ground, they probably know there was a crime. So there's a common language there that that really helped quite a bit. It made the experience accessible and quickly gain context, mutual understanding, engagement and back story.
 
4. SERENDIPITY MANAGEMENT
 
A classic screenwriting principle is that you're supposed to show, not simply tell, but interactive designers often get very concerned that people won't know how to interact with something in the proper way, so end up telling too much. 

But we left a lot of gaps in this experience and because we left those gaps, the imaginations of the participants filled them, leading to these really wonderful kind of moments where they would collide into each other in unexpected ways. And these collaborative, creative sparks would pop up out of it, which was really exciting.
 
When we were trying to work out how to manage the creative process of thousands of people. We ended up running an open MOOC usually known as a massive open online course, but we called it a massive online offline collaboration, open to whoever wanted to participate.
 
PARTIPATORY URBANISM
So it was interesting how something so simple was so effective in terms of people being able to organize themselves. 

We had this road rotary phone that had a Raspberry Pi with a text to speech engine.   So you could write to it from a distance and it would ring, it was also beacon aware so whenever  the phone got near something, it would recognize that it was there and ring, right. So then all of a sudden, somebody would start interacting with a character, you know, a killer and a cat mouse game or whatever.

We made that code open source because we want these IoT objects to be something that stimulates creativity within a group of people.
 
Ubiquitous computing is like calm technology, it's all about being in the peripheral, it's not necessarily about being buried in your device. And in fact, when we did have a device and we used it, it broke the flow, because everybody became very interested in the screen. So what we're trying to do with this is say, can we use objects that are enchanted in some way or smart objects that people can use as a way to tell a story. So it becomes about the human interaction and not necessarily solely about a screen interaction.
 
And the other thing that's interesting about the project is there's no win scenario. We remove that, you know, there's not one right way that a crime is solved or crime is created. So it becomes very much a collaborative form of story and play.
 
At TheDigital Storytelling Lab we’re now exploring participatory urbanism and the collaborative design of neighbourhoods through storytelling. For example we partnered the City of Los Angeles and did a storytelling innovation lab with them. The project was called My Sky Is Falling and it was shaped with foster youth in collaboration with the students.

70% of whom tend to end up addicted to substances, pregnant or homeless. It was heartbreaking. But together with the students they made an immersive science fiction story. We also teamed up with MIT and they gave us a bracelet that participants could wear to track their emotions as they went through the experience. And instead of relying on pre survey and post survey, and audio video transcription we came up with 26 different feedback loops within the experience itself. There's a really cool white paper on it if you're interested you can find it at myskyisfalling.com
 
When it pointed to and, just like Sherlock was this idea that stories can spark a really interesting innovation because that prototype was made for a couple hundred dollars. And then the UN invited us to run it there - and now it's being adapted in three different states as a framework to train, potential foster care parents and social workers to understand the emotional journey of a foster youth because when you go through the experience. .So this idea of inspiring greater understanding is really interesting and making use of technology to do so is something that we are very interested in doing
 
STORIES ARE NOW EVENTS
This is an amazing time to be a storyteller.  A story maybe isn't just by one person anymore, it’s a collaborative community event.  And increasingly now we’re seeing the rise of creative technologists who are using stories to create a common understanding.
 
EVENTS CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE
​I did a project with David Cronenberg called body mind change. And it was kind of about this idea of a personal recommendation engine that you just put into the back of your neck through synaptic entanglement. That's a word we made up it didn't exist. The engine would know everything you wanted needed and desire before you did. And so that story was all about the quantified self and about artificial intelligence and about this idea of emotional intelligence. But what is interesting about this the moment is that we have the opportunity to change the way that these stories are told.
 
For example, if an object is connected to a network it can send you media. You could build subscription models off of that. That object could change over time, it could change state, it could recognize other things around it and it could change the way it interacts. It could do simple things like change colours, it could change the lights when you walked into a room, whatever you want.

This idea of allowing those formerly known as the audience to be collaborators in the creative process allows them to create something or co create something that they care about, that can evolve over time. And new business models can come from it.
But this apparoch also breaks from permission based culture, so you don't have to spend years trying to convince somebody that you want to make something, you can just make it.

Weiler, Lance. 2018. Story Driven Innovation. U.S.: fitc events.

In this 2016 VRDC session, Minds + Assembly's Tracey John, Radial Games' Andy Moore, Tomorrow Today Labs' Brian Van Buren, and independent designer Kayla Kinnunen explore the challenges and necessities of making sure virtual reality experiences will remain accessible to players of all backgrounds. ​

18 -20% of the population have some kind of disability (visual impairments, hearing impairments, cognitive impairments, motor and mobility impairments) and this figure increases rapidly with age.
 
There are some people for whom VR just isn't an option e.g. anybody who wears glasses may struggle with VR. But many more can gain access, so long as the software is designed in an inclusive way.  Accessibility forces you as a developer to think outside of your own box – to be more than the bad designer only designing for themselves e.g. If you build a room scale experience, that game should also be playable by someone who is seated and can only play with a single hand.
 
If you design an experience for an abled body adult within the normal height variance, you are writing off a large number of people, you're even blocking off yourself at certain age groups e.g. small children don't have the same reach, or cognitive capacities. 
 
DESIGN QUESTIONS
 
– Think how the human body interacts and experiences space with the game.
- Ask: what if I have to do this with one hand?
- Ask: what if I have to have a standing-only mobile experience that someone who seated needs to use?
- Ask: should I be putting objects on the floor for people who have difficulty bending over?
- And question why you should force somebody to do a Konami code, when just pressing the trigger button will do?
 
DESIGN TIPS:

There’s a lot of knowhow in this area now…go to gameaccessibilityguidelines.com, go to Microsoft's webpage on how to create an accessible video game and take on board those suggestions like MAPPABLE CONTROLS for people who can’t easily press buttons.
 
1. CREATE ALTERNATIVES

Try to be comprehensive in what you're designing so when you're designing a space in VR use the entire toolkit you have available.  Instead of creating a cutscene, it's about designing how to make people to look at things, and how to use colour palettes, or designing a comprehensive cue, something that uses audio AND lighting.

e.g. When I was designing an earlier iteration of our game, in order to get people to turn their heads, I would use audio cues because positional audio is such a powerful tool in virtual reality, but people with hearing impairments wouldn’t respond, so that forced me to redesign our trigger system and redesigned our cue system making sure that there was a visual aid as well, like targeted lights and flashing arrows.

When you're trying to design with accessibility in mind, you come up with solutions that end up killing three or four birds with one stone. So. if you want to design an experience that's playable on a desk, instead of at room scale, you've now solved the problem of people having to bend over because now everything's at desk, and if you make the desk height, variable, that supports small people like children. Even the challenge of limited mobility is solved.  All these problems are solved sometimes with a very simple solution. You can actually open up whole new markets, not just for people with disabilities, but people with small living rooms also benefit…and all of a sudden you're now solving for platforms that maybe have more limited tracking areas as well.
 
2. EXTEND HUMAN REACH

So, imagine a default action where you walk over to something, you pick it up, you walk over to where you want to put it, and you place it down - instead one group created a ray cast from the controller to act as a highlight so that whenever that red cast collided with another object in space, pulling the grab button would just suck that virtual object right into your hand.  To extend that they also allowed for a half Press to hold an object in place where it wasn't at a distance. And so that would allow people to move things around. That would also allow them to kind of hold down a half trigger and move their arm backwards and actually extend an object out. This allowed the user to have full control of object placement within a three dimensional room scale space, all without actually moving from their chair.
 
3. MAKE PLAYERS MORE MOBILE
 
The easiest things you can do for mobility is to have teleporting in your game. It adds a way for somebody to navigate around your space in a very intuitive way, especially if you also add rotation on the teleport so that you can actually highlight a space where you want to go to and then immediately pick a direction you want to face. This would allow somebody that's chair bound, and only able to face in one direction to put themselves at any position on the map.
 
Alternative mobility design strategies -
 
To keep the pleasure of movement and gesture we added a grabby claw. You can take a stick and telescope it out using your physical motion.  And you can hit the buttons on the controller to grab things remotely and still move them. So, you still get a sense of connectedness and presence.
 
And instead of going for teleportation, we opted for scaling. You can scale the whole environment so that your natural arm reach can now reach across your room instead of having a teleport button.
 
Not every solution works in every in every application. But if you think about these kinds of things early on in development e.g. knowing that scale is an option really opens a lot of doors.
 
4. TEST WITH DIFFERENT SHAPED BODIES
 
If you’re trying to make a game accessible later in the development process you have to just do a ton of user testing and watch for the pain points, which could just be like a sigh of frustration. If someone keeps having to bend over and pick something up.  These sorts of barriers are likely to first show up as annoyances. to people that are able bodied.
 
 e.g. One of the various near field interactions we were asking players to do is to play a game beer pong. And there was a ball dispenser that would dispense the ping pong balls that came out and would throw them and there were visual rewards if you knocked all the balls out of the out of the container…for Wesley, who is our artist who is six foot seven and has a bad hip and bad knee, for him to bend over and repeatedly try to pick them up was very painful. So we ended up putting a detector in there, so if a nearby space is ever empty of balls, the programme then pours out a bunch more balls and refills the container so that people don't think of that as being an accessibility concern.

People have different head heights – does this affect the play?
 
If you are at a different head height, there are multiple different ways to get around that-  scaling being one of them, being able to adjust the head height of the users is another one, as is designing the space so that it is customizable. e.g. make the height of the control panel adjustable.
 
e.g. in our game Fantastic Contraption your toolbox is a cat. If you double-click the cat comes flying and you can position the anywhere in the world by just like clicking your finger and calling the cat. But something that a lot of people discover fairly quickly is if you pick up the cat, and you place it anywhere, at any height, not even on the ground, it'll just hover in that position, so that you can customize the play space and put your tools wherever you want them. And we have made prototypes of other games where every metallic control panel has bolts, and if you undo the bolts, you can pick up the whole control panel and move it. So, it's not difficult to build in these kinds of features.
 
Install your game on someone's computer and watch them play it at home over time.
 
We discovered that many Vive players don't use headphones at all, so you can't rely on audio cues at all.
We also found that if you don't support seated play, then good luck having a successful title on, say, psvr.
If you don't support forward facing gameplay, then good luck launching on Oculus.
… if you solve for disabilities, you also grow your market incredibly.

Reach out to your local disability meet-up groups and invite people to try your game out.
And remember to play test with people who have different sorts of disabilities because motor impairment is very different from mobility impairment, which is very different from hearing impairment, which is very different from vision impairment, which is very different from cognitive impairment. Each have their own specific needs.
 
5. MAKE YOUR OWN CONTROLS
​
As a wheelchair user, I turn in a tank fashion where I will turn one wheel one way and one wheel the other way in order to do a tight turn. And for the Vive controllers, if I have to hold down a button in order to keep holding on to an object, that becomes very difficult for me so I'll just put the five controllers in my lap and move to the area that I'm at turn or do whatever. Okay, same problem with the Oculus, the sensor ring for the Oculus Touch gets in the way and I'm using the butt of my palm in order to turn and this for something that requires you as a user to make quick turns and quick movement changes it really screws things up - so Valve has made the hardware of the sensors available so you can partner with them and modify the sensors to create your own controllers and that's really going to make it very easy for people to come up with personalised controls, so there's no reason that you can't go to your local maker-space with a 3d model of a controller and build it. And that's going to make it a lot easier if you need to design controllers that have straps on them to strap the controller into someone's hand because they don't have the grip strength in order to keeps a controller to their hand. Or if someone needs to have larger buttons, because they have less motor control those these things, the hardware solutions are there. It's just building them.
 
It becomes important to understand what are the base actions that you're trying to accomplish, and then allowing for the possibility of end users being able to remap those actions to different inputs.
 
And the great thing with VR is it allows for a lot more inputs to just happen naturally. So, you can use gaze, you can use head position, gaze will get even more higher fidelity when we actually have eyeball tracking… it's a puzzle. And I've seen some people experimenting with interesting gameplay designs where the hand controllers are intended for a second or third player and the main character only uses the headset.  We can get incredibly creative here.

2016. Making AR and VR truly accessible. In GDC Vault, edited by GDC. U.S.: YouTube.