These best practices for Meta Quest developers are designed to help you create great immersive experiences that users will enjoy. These are specific recommendations for making safe and comfortable experiences. Note that as a developer, you are responsible for ensuring that the content of your app conforms to all safety standards, industry best practices, and the latest scientific research on comfort and safety in VR.

VR is rapidly evolving, and following the recommendations here won’t guarantee a comfortable or enjoyable experience. Iterative user testing of your content is critical. Keep notes of your successes and failures and roll your ongoing learnings into your development processes. We count on you, the community of Meta Quest developers, to provide feedback and help us mature and maintain these evolving VR best practices.

While there are several specific best practices for VR app development in the sections that follow this overview, we strongly recommend that you implement these three in each and every app.

Intense VR experiences can lead to symptoms such as eyestrain, disorientation, and nausea in some users. This is sometimes referred to as Visually Induced Motion Sickness (VIMS). A comfortable VR experience is generally achieved by minimizing sensory mismatches and discontinuities with our real world experience, and getting as many of our sensory processes to agree as possible. For more information, see Comfort and Usability. If you can’t follow these fundamental best practices in your app, you must still find ways to minimize the risk of VIMS.

Certain types of flashing or patterned images are believed to be capable of triggering photosensitive seizures in a small portion of the population. The International Standards Organization has published ISO 9241-391:2016 as a standard for image content to reduce the risk of photosensitive seizures. You are responsible for reviewing the standards and literature on photosensitive seizures and image safety and for designing content that conforms to these standards.

Excessive use without breaks is not recommended. We encourage you to design content in a manner that makes it possible for users to take breaks and easily resume the app experience.

For more information about health and safety, please see the Meta Quest Health and Safety Warnings which are provided to all users who purchase a Meta Quest system.

VR is still a largely uncharted medium, waiting for creative artists and developers to unlock its full potential. Balancing immersion, usability, and comfort is just one of many challenges ahead of us in VR design. It’s up to you to create the experiences that are going to transport users to whole new worlds—and we can’t wait for that to happen!

Ready to learn more about immersive VR apps? Dive into Vision for tips about how to display the virtual world you’re creating to your users and is provided with a bit more explanation due to its complexity.

Be sure to visit developer.oculus.com and the Meta Quest Developer Blog for the latest information and discussions on designing VR content.

Find something interesting that you want to share about these topics? Post it to the Meta Quest Developer Forum. We (and the VR community) appreciate any input you’d like to share.