You put a great deal of time and effort into every aspect of your immersive experience. Whether you’re just starting to assess different game mechanics or about to upload your app for store review, one element of the development process is consistently important: testing.

While this VR playtesting guide is an informative start, keep in mind that testing is a very deep topic. We recommend further research into the subject if you’re new to this process and preparing to manage your team’s testing efforts.

In this guide, we cover each stage of a VR playtest from start to finish, providing numerous tips, best practices, example documents, and further resources. The guide is broken down into three specific sections:

Guide Overview (Current Page): This page provides some of the high level best practices + resources to keep in mind throughout your testing process.

Playtest Plan and Survey Writing: We outline a number of best practices for your initial testing research, test surveys, documenting your goals, engaging your audience, and other items to keep in mind prior to your test.

Playtest Facilitation + Data Analysis: Tips on how to most effectively facilitate your playtest, whether remotely or in-person. We also provide a series of recommendations for your post-test data analysis + reporting.

For a helpful video resource on playtesting, check out the following free course produced in partnership with Unity: Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR. Unit 10 of the course features six informative videos that cover playtest types, testing for comfort, general testing best practices, and more.

The full course covers topics from performance optimization and audio to marketing strategy and locomotion design. The course is free to everyone and available on the Unity Learn Website today.

Depending on your budget and time constraints, it might make sense for you to engage a third-party organization or tool to support your playtesting efforts. Some of these will simply help you facilitate communication with your testers, while others will manage your entire playtesting process from planning and recruiting, to implementation and reporting.

We recommend ensuring that the organization you select has experience with the intricacies of VR design and the hardware landscape. If it’s your first time working with this kind of support, you may want to discuss the topic with a professional peer before moving forward.

Like each point featured in this guide, timing will depend on your goals and resources, especially if you are working with a third party organization. It can be a good rule of thumb to allocate 6 weeks prior to starting your playtest. This will give you ample time for project scoping, the script/survey build, and recruitment + scheduling which usually take about 2 weeks per phase.

If this is your first time playtesting, we would also recommend giving yourself at least a week to research the topic of playtesting + QA.

As playtesting is a massive topic, you may want to learn even more on the subject. See below for just a snapshot of these materials:

Special thanks to Schell Games, Real VR Fishing, Kluge Interactive, and VR Oxygen for their input in developing this guide.

Disclaimer: This guide provides an overview of the best practices, tips, tools and processes for VR app testing. Playtesting, QA, and application testing can be quite complicated and it is recommended that you do your own research to be fully informed on the topic. Please also note that the information provided within this guide does not in any way guarantee flawless testing, or success when submitting content to the Meta Horizon Store.