VR is an entirely new 3D medium. Creating immersive and interactive VR experiences introduces a new set of physiological, ergonomic, and technical challenges, and in the rapidly changing landscape of VR development, the industry is still just beginning to create a consistent, shared language for immersive interactions. How does a user move comfortably in VR? How do they interact with the world?

Elements is a collection of tested solutions that showcase best practices for immersive VR design. Each Element is presented as an interactive design lesson that is available both as a set of experiential demos on the Play Store and as an open source project, so that developers can quickly and easily leverage these design patterns in their own projects.

The team that works on Elements is the same team that builds our developer platforms and provides direct engineering support to Daydream developers. To decide what interactions to include, our team dove deeply into existing apps and worked closely with many struggling developers to understand how common design challenges have been solved and which problems are still looking for a solution. Next, we prototyped ideas while testing them both in-house and with third-party developers to get a sense of what was working.

The work of Daydream Elements has already started influencing mobile VR apps. One example is the popular Daydream game “Eclipse - Edge of Light”. Eclipse uses the tunneling effect to reduce the risk of simulator sickness, which works by limiting rapid motion around the outer perimeter of the user’s field of view as they’re moving around the world.

Daydream Elements is not intended to simply prescribe to developers how they must build their experiences. Rather, it is meant to reflect the best practices of VR design that are evolving over time and provide an opportunity for developers to learn and use those best practices.

In the rapidly changing landscape of virtual reality development, the industry is still just beginning to create a consistent, shared language for immersive interactions. This creates an incredible opportunity for developers to experiment, but also makes it harder for developers to know what the right thing to do is. It also means that less tools are available to make it easy for developers to create consistent and high quality content. Daydream Elements is all about addressing both sides of this challenge.

It is a place where we are building that shared language for immersive interactions while simultaneously providing tools for developers that they can use out-of-the-box or to springboard off of into new ideas. No one alone can establish what the future of UX is going to be. Daydream Elements is a step towards us building it together as a community.