An overview to VR best practices

More and more is being discovered and written each day about the dos and don'ts when designing and developing for VR. Google provides a couple of resources to help developers build great VR experiences, including the following:

VR motion sickness is a real symptom and concern for virtual reality caused in part by a lag in screen updates, or latency, when you're moving your head. Your brain expects the world around you to change exactly in sync with your actual motion. Any perceptible delay can make you feel uncomfortable, to say the least, and possibly nauseous. Latency can be reduced by faster rendering of each frame to maintain the recommended frames per second. Desktop VR apps are held to the high standard of 90 FPS, enabled by a custom HMD screen. On mobile devices, the screen hardware often limits refresh rates to 60 FPS, or in the worst case, 30 FPS.

There are additional causes of VR motion sickness and other user discomforts, which can be mitigated by following these design guidelines:

Applications for virtual reality also differ from conventional Android apps in other ways, such as:

So, let's say that you've got your awesome Cardboard app done and it is ready to publish. Now what? There's a line you can put in the AndroidManifest file that marks the app as a Cardboard app. Google's Cardboard app includes a Google Play Store browser used to find a Cardboard app. Then just publish it as you would do for any normal Android application.