UXies 2017 Silver Winner - Daydream Elements by Google

Daydream Elements is a collection of tech demos that showcase principles and best practices for developing high-quality VR experiences. “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.”