The developers of the much anticipated Oculus Rift have released the first draft of what can be essentially summed up as a how-to guide for developers that are thinking about developing games with the Oculus Rift in mind.
Serving as a go-to reference guide, the Oculus VR Best Practices Guide provides developers with the basics when developing games for VR, including instructions on how to minimize certain indirect effects that may, in certain users, induce motion sickness or vertigo.
According to Polygon , the document lists off various hints and tips that focus on making the experience for the user more comfortable when using the Oculus Rift. Detailed in its summary, the document touches on matters regarding how a game should be optimized for a smoother visual experience, such as minimizing latency, how a game should be rendered from the perspective of how it’d appear through the Oculus Rift, optimisation and even headtracking.
Since the guide focuses on player comfort, developers are discouraged from using cheats to give the illusion of immersion, like only rendering certain parts of the environment in order to save local memory and processing. Instead, developers are very much encouraged to go the whole nine yards in favor of giving the player as much immersion as possible, in as much as to use as much physics, lighting, and various other dynamic systems as possib le, because the “virtual world should always be complete and continuous around the user” and doing less may cause discomfort in the user.
While the document is free for the public eye to view, it is, however, only in draft form and is currently “pending legal and medical expert review,” as what is continually iterated at the bottom of each page of the document. The Oculus VR Best Practices Guide is available for free here , and have a read of it for yourself if you so wish.