The “No-Interface” Interface for Research VR

The potential to create innovative and immersive systems for interaction within Virtual reality (VR), as suggested by VR pioneers, initially appeared limitless, and promised to bring rise to a whole new paradigm of interface and interaction design. Yet over quarter of a century later, in the so-called second-wave of VR, most of the standard metaphors for creating interfaces in VR are an extension of either the desktop metaphor of the personal computer or the Heads Up Display of the first person computer game. In this paper we consider how we then design for interactions in VR that take full advantage of the media's affordances, without relying on these familiar metaphors, yet being familiar enough as to engender intuitive and meaningful use? We will explore this question by introducing our Layered Horizons information visualisation as a case study alongside a survey of important voices from the history of VR interface design.