Jason Jerald (NextGen Interactions)

MIT Student Center, Room 491

The most important part of VR interaction is the person doing the interacting. Human-centered interaction design focuses on the human side of communication between users and machines – the interface from the user’s perspective. Focusing on users is more important for VR than for any other medium. When VR is done well, interactions can be brilliant and pleasurable, but when they are done badly, they can result in frustration, fatigue, and sickness. There are many causes of bad VR, but the problems are usually centered on poor understanding of human perception, intuitive interaction, design principles, and real users. Quality interactions enhance user understanding of what has just occurred, what is happening, what can be done, and how to do it. For the best VR applications, not only must goals and needs be efficiently achieved, but the experiences must be engaging and enjoyable

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Jason Jerald
Jason Jerald

Jason Jerald has been creating virtual reality systems and applications for approximately 20 years. His work has been featured on ABC’s Shark Tank and the Discovery Channel, in the New York Times, and on the cover of the MIT Press Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. He currently serves in multiple technical and leadership roles, have built and led teams as large as ~300 individuals, and regularly speak at conferences and other programs. Jerald hold over 20 publications and patents in the areas of virtual/augmented reality, human-computer interaction, and computer graphics.

"The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality" published by ACM Books and Morgan & Claypool Publisher is the #1 best seller at SIGGRAPH 2015 and continues to be the #1 selling book out of approximately 1000 books published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

Specialties: virtual & augmented reality; strategic advice & technical business planning; software development & hardware integration; human-computer interaction; perception, immersion, & presence; 3D computer graphics & real-time rendering; virtual humans; user studies; team leadership & mentoring; seminar speaking and training.