Many VR apps handle user authentication poorly, leaving users frustrated when trying to sign in to new apps. Join Auth0’s open discussion on IdP-neutral experiences.
TL;DR: Despite the recent spike in adoption, VR (Virtual Reality) is still a new medium. Many VR apps handle user authentication poorly, leaving users frustrated when trying to sign in to new apps. As part of our research for improving the developer and the user experience for VR authentication, we propose an incremental improvement approach for user authentication experience for VR and open the discussion on what it will take to achieve better IdP-neutral experiences.
VR Is Accelerating; AR Is Next
It’s not very common for sci-fi tropes to actually come true in our lifetimes (“where is my flying car?”), but it looks like it’s happening to Virtual Reality (VR).
Thirty years ago, VR was a thing on the pages of Neal Stephenson or at the movies. The Oculus Quest 2, a standalone VR headset priced at less than half of a modern gaming console, was one of the must-have gadgets of the holiday season 2021 — accelerating a run that has been going strong since its release date. With Meta’s increasing investment in the Metaverse, this adoption is only likely to continue.
The distribution and price point have been an absolute boon for developers, in particular for game developers, who are increasingly targeting VR users with their products. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in forced isolation, social distancing, and increased remote work, all of which inspired a brand new wave of immersive collaboration and social networking tools (Workrooms and Horizon are just two examples of the many apps in those new categories). Job training, fitness, even therapy are among the other categories emerging as applications that can really benefit from the new medium.
There are signs suggesting that this is only the beginning. Meta seems to be on top of today’s VR market, but it’s clear that they will soon face formidable competitors. Apple, Google, and Snapchat are reported to be working on VR and augmented reality (AR) headsets of their own.
AR has the potential to be an even bigger revolution than smartphones, bringing a semantic layer on top of everyday reality, and today’s development tools for VR can be used to target AR as well. It’s no wonder that new VR applications are proliferating in greater numbers every day.
Authentication in Today’s VR Apps
At first glance, one might think that developing apps for VR is a big technical challenge. As it turns out, developing an app that can run on a VR headset is surprisingly easy.
VR headsets were first popularized and remain primarily used as gaming devices with a blossoming developer community. The gaming industry created extraordinary tools such as the Unity game engine and development platform. Unity began in 2005 and is now a comprehensive ecosystem with creator tools, a vibrant community, and abundant content that makes it easy (and free for indie developers) to create 3D games targeting PC, consoles, iOS, and Android.
VR headset manufacturers such as Meta and Google (Google pioneered the cardboard headset class) leveraged Unity’s popularity, releasing SDKs that make it very easy to retarget existing and new apps to their hardware and expose the special capabilities of the VR environment through primitives compatible with the Unity API.
Having the tools to easily make an existing app run in VR, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that its experience in VR will be good as-is! Let’s pick a concrete example: the authentication experience.
Games and apps originally designed to run on a desktop can rely on a vastly different arsenal of affordances: full keyboards, password managers, the ability to switch between your app and a system browser... all those things are either problematic or impossible in VR at the moment.
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