Design
Onboarding best practices
Updated: Sep 15, 2026
This document guides you through the best practices when onboarding players in a VR or MR game that uses hand interactions.
Hand interactions can offer a more intuitive way to navigate menus and pick up objects, and can add immersion when the game world responds to the player’s hands. But they also bring design challenges: without familiar controllers, discrete buttons, or haptic feedback, games need extra time to teach players how to interact using only their hands, and must provide extra feedback on the results of those interactions. Here are some best practices for getting new players familiar with hand interactions.
Instruct players to put their controllers away
Remove ambiguity from the start. Assure players that everything they need will be accessible through hand interactions. Hand tracking is still new to many players, and they may not understand exactly what is possible. Explicitly instructing players to put their controllers away avoids awkwardness, such as dangling controllers on wrist straps or players using one hand with a controller and the other with hand tracking.
Maestro reminds players that either control method is possible, and adapts the tutorials according to what the player uses. It specifically instructs players to 'put the controllers away' to avoid tracking issues.
If your game has a main menu, players will start using hand interactions before gameplay even begins. Your main menu likely needs some light tutorial support to help players select options anyway, and this moment can serve both purposes: it also sets expectations for how players should interact with your game more broadly.
This can take multiple shapes, such as a simple interactive title screen like Cubism’s below, or a small “playground” of interactable objects in a starting hub that lets players get a feel for how interacting works through play and curiosity.
Cubism's main menu lets players grab and place the game's colorful blocks into the game logo, a fun and educational introduction.
Present a toggle for left-handed play if your game relies heavily on hand dexterity
Many hand-interaction games distinguish between left- and right-handed play, reflecting a dominant and a non-dominant hand. Players can struggle with tutorial steps that rely on dexterity, such as writing, painting, or throwing, if they are forced to use their non-dominant hand.
Left-handed players may not think to open the settings, or may assume the game automatically detects whether they are left- or right-handed. Offer players a toggle before left- or right-handed play becomes relevant to gameplay.
Prioritize teaching gestures that involve adjusting the player’s play area and comfort
Gestures for moving a game board or picking up and selecting distant objects are worth teaching early, since they reduce unnecessary movement. This way, players are not fatigued by walking across the room to reach a menu button.
Puzzling Places lets players grab distant pieces to pick the ones they need.
Forever Pets offers immediate guidance on adjusting the table height, so it's comfortable for the player.
Show, don’t tell hand gestures
Text-heavy tutorials are harder to follow in VR than interactive learning: players want to play, not read, while they are in a game. Keep players playing so they learn by doing (see teaching through play). Any instruction more complicated than “pinch that” should carry support beyond text: a scenario, an animation, a voice line, or some other demonstration.
If a gesture is simple and intuitive enough to learn through experimentation alone, such as grabbing or pushing something, a demonstration might not be needed. A well-designed, purpose-built space for players to try things out can be enough.
Vacation Simulator teaches two interactions and repeats the visual instructions when players must do the interactions again.
Animated prompts stay on screen until the player successfully performs the gesture.
Show gestures being enacted using animated hand demonstrations
Demonstrate gestures visually with animated hand demonstrations: outlines of 3D hands that animate naturally to show the gesture. Rendering them in 3D lets players inspect the demonstration from multiple angles, so they can see exactly which fingers are moving and what they are touching. Keep the demonstration on screen and loop the animation, so players can carefully inspect and experiment with the gesture, especially if it is unnatural or multi-step.
Use a neutral hand representation. Avoid bulky mittens, paws, hooves, or other fantastical appendages, since they make the gesture harder to read.
Maestro visually shows the action, and its timing, required to start playing.
Drakheir uses 3D animated hand demonstrations, shown from the player's point of view, which repeat the gesture animation until the player repeats it successfully.
Direct player attention deliberately
Because VR lets players look anywhere at any time, traditional framing does not work. To make sure players see critical events, including gesture tutorials and animated hand demonstrations, without breaking immersion, use spatial and sensory cues to guide their gaze naturally.
Maestro uses streams of light to guide attention to specific locations.
Reduce text to a minimum
If you use text, keep it short and to the point. Follow the color contrast and typography guidance so it stays legible.
Forever Pets uses several "mini-tutorials" with short text and emphasized key words.
Short, chunked-up tutorials work best
For games with complex hand interactions, teach one or two gestures at a time. Give players a chance to practice, then deliver a gameplay payoff, usually some form of progression, before moving on to the next gesture. Resist the urge to teach everything at once: players will have trouble retaining the information and are likely to get bored. See teaching one core interaction at a time for more.
Puzzling Places lets players replay the full tutorial or review individual tutorial sections.
Forever Pets only teaches players aspects of the game when they are relevant.
For critical gestures, require successful input to progress
Require players to successfully perform a critical gesture before they can advance. This confirms that the player has learned the gesture, rather than reading or skipping a prompt and moving on.
Create a safe space for players to try
Players benefit from a stress-free place to practice: somewhere they cannot fail, and will not be distracted or interrupted. Avoid time pressure or threats while teaching players how to play. If your game inherently has time pressure, such as playing along to a song that ends, give players an immediate retry option.
Ideally, this practice space is an otherwise-representative scenario with the stressors removed. Practicing in an unrelated context makes the eventual switch to real gameplay jarring.
Maestro presents players with a short, low-pressure trial where all they need to do is wave in time with the beat of some whistling. Note the empty orchestra seats: the intro is low pressure, with no one else 'present.'
Provide visual feedback
Because hands provide no haptic feedback the way a controller does, visual feedback matters even more, as the audio and visual feedback guidance explains. Color-code or highlight the active fingers, for example the index finger and thumb for a pinch, and add a visual effect when the gesture succeeds, following the active-finger highlighting principle and the progress feedback already built into hand representation. UI elements should also highlight and respond when hands interact with them, such as pressing a button or picking up an object.
Practice makes perfect
Help players internalize a skill by having them enact it more than once. Players do not need to repeat a skill in a row: letting them practice it in varied contexts, where relevant, prepares them even better for the challenges ahead.
Once a skill is mastered in isolation, give players scenarios that combine it with previously learned skills.
Forever Pets has players feed and stroke their pet multiple times during onboarding, interspersed with other activities for variety.
Help players recall instructional content, if they want it
Provide players with options to recall skills or concepts. Let players revisit tutorial lessons through in-game menus, covering game concepts as well as controls. If players reach a section that requires them to recall a previously taught skill, it is a great time to surface extra help.
This is especially important for hand interactions, which have no physical affordance to fall back on the way a labeled button does (see onboarding for the hands version).
This optional content can also describe gestures and concepts in more detail, rather than repeating the same material, and can be a great place to explain controls and mechanics in more depth without interrupting the initial tutorial flow.
Maestro uses in-game "sheet music" that adds to immersion and lets players reliably consult it up close.
Waltz of the Wizard gives players a "spellbook" to explore. Players can hold the book aloft in one hand and cast spells with the other.
Allow players to set the pace for their learning
If players breeze through your tutorial content, let them skip dialogue instead of slowing them down. On the other hand, if the game recognizes a player spending a long time in an area or repeatedly failing, consider providing additional help.
Vacation Simulator gives audible prompts for players struggling to remove their backpack, with increasing specificity and guidance if they don't complete the gesture.
Reinforce skills if players are constantly failing
Be ready to give even experienced players gentle nudges if their gestures are not precise enough. Players commonly drift over time, for example turning a single-finger index-and-thumb pinch into a two-finger index, middle finger, and thumb pinch. If a player tries and fails a gesture several times in a row, offer specific feedback on the precise action needed.
When players get fully locked in, they may not notice their own gestures getting sloppy, or may perceive the game as failing to keep up with their fast, well-practiced moves. See movement speed for more on this limitation. Players can be quick to blame the game as buggy or imprecise instead.
Well-timed prompts can bring a player’s attention back to their body, away from the task and onto their hands, to reset their focus on deliberate gesture enactment.
Next steps
Designing experiences
- Hands best practices: Core guidance for designing hand interactions, including teaching one interaction at a time and in-app gesture reminders.
- Plain language principles for hands: The underlying principles behind teaching through play, active-finger highlighting, and player pacing referenced throughout this page.
- Hands UI best practices: Sizing, density, and feedback guidance for interfaces built for hand interactions.
- Limitations and mitigations: Design and code mitigations for tracking volume, occlusion, lighting, and movement-speed limitations in hand tracking.
- Hand representation: Neutral hand models and the progress-feedback mechanism used when a gesture succeeds.
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