This playbook provides essential tips and best practices for presenting your mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences on the Meta Quest headsets at the best quality:

For best quality, Meta Quest 3 should be used to capture mixed reality experiences.

You can also download this guide as a PDF. PDF Download (3.3 MB)

As you prepare to create content for the publishing approval process, there are two main areas to consider for the final product:

If the requirements and policies are not met in your submission, it can delay the approval process. Be sure to check if your content falls outside the criteria outlined in these guidelines. Also heed the safety recommendations outlined in Video Capture and Production Policies.

With any footage, recording at the highest quality is the main priority. However, by leveraging filmmaking techniques, you can refine the presentation of your experience and focus on capturing key moments, such as important interactions or features. By creating a story around your experience, you can leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Within a short trailer, it becomes extremely important to focus on the user’s experience, as well as the major themes and mechanics of the application. By creating storyboards to highlight key moments within mixed reality, you can develop a sense of what kind of recordings or user shots you want. Specifically, if you have a single player experience, you are probably limited to first person footage. To support the storyboard, something like a loose script can be used, so that you can flow through the story of your experience and focus on the details of your footage.

Especially with mixed reality, users are able to experience the world physically around them. Because of this, it is important to have a clean set around you while recording. By blocking the set, you can capture a user from different parts of the room (or even different rooms entirely), and show the motion of your application. It’s good practice to remove some of the extra clutter in the room. This allows the focus to remain on the game assets you would like to feature. For additional requirements, see Video Capture and Production Policies: The Set.

Finally, with an ideal area to film our users in the experience, lighting can also play an important role, and make the video editing process easier. With entry level LED lights, you can illuminate the area in front of a user to highlight their hands, or make sure an entire room is well-lit with several lights. The amount of lighting you need depends on the kinds of shots you’re trying to capture.

Send a casting call out to hire actors and help sell the story that reflects the target audience of your application. Make sure to review several applicants before hiring so you can find the best fit for your trailer. In cases where there is no need to hire professional actors, or if your budget does not allow for it, try to find some friends to play the part. This allows you to focus on directing the actor to best represent the app.

For further casting guidelines to ensure your asset meets Meta’s compliance requirements, see Video Capture and Production Policies: User traits.

Now that you have an idea of the story you are telling, here are some recommendations for how to capture first and third person perspectives from your headset. Specifically, the following sections allow you to capture mixed reality and VR experiences with Meta Quest devices.

Capturing MR/VR footage in this perspective gives viewers a sense of what it’s like to play your game. In particular, this perspective can be helpful for Portrait mode viewing with short format content, enabling a viewer to be immersed in the experience. We go over the highest settings available to you in-headset, but if you want details on pushing the technical limits of quality, the Advanced: Record with Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) section has more details on unlocking these options.

With all of these settings in place, you can fire up your app, select the Home menu button, and select the camera icon on the same window to start recording. Your headset captures everything you see. For best results with MR/VR POV capture, be sure to use slow head movements, being sure you frame shots according to the eye you selected to record in camera settings. Remember, you are acting as the camera operator.

If your app allows multiplayer or if your developers are able to add multiplayer to utilize a second or third player as a camera, another option is available to you: capturing third-person footage.

Capturing third-person footage of MR/VR often creates a more compelling perspective for the viewer, increasing engagement and interest. As the camera operator, you are able to capture specific angles around the user, creating views of the larger environment. In addition, you can move around the user or with them to add more action to your footage.

Whether it’s one person or ten people, you can capture the engagement of your app in different ways. You can be off to the side as objects fly at a player, or right in front of them to see simple interactions. Remember, as the camera operator, the best practices for POV capture still apply (such as moving slowly).

You should also take the game’s environment into account as the application may not be able to tell the distance of the person from the camera being captured. This can create issues with game assets that may be overlaid on their body, even though the assets are behind the user. With this in mind, it is best to capture footage where game objects are intentionally in front of the user you are filming.

Additionally, using an additional player to capture footage in a VR app only shows in-app visuals, and not the real-life player. For more information on how to insert real people into a third-person VR capture, see Advanced: Composite Third Person.

Now that you have the recordings you want, you’ll need to get them onto a computer to edit the footage. This helps to cut out unnecessary or bad recordings and focus on the story of your experience. Please keep in mind this process is not compatible with Mac. For more information on transferring saved files from a Mac, see Advanced: Record with Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH).

In just a few steps, your recordings are now available to be edited.

Finally, you can use your video files in video editing software to clean up your recordings. Here are some editing suggestions:

With your footage all cleaned up, you are ready to export it to a video file such as an .mp4 and upload it to any platform.

As an alternative to recording footage directly on the headset, you can leverage the Meta Quest Developer Hub.

If your MR/VR application requires a lot of system performance, you may notice periodic frame dropping. If that is the case, we suggest using the settings recommended in either First Person Footage or Third Person Footage.

If the quality of the native Meta Quest output does not meet your needs, please use a PC VR build with at least 1080p 60 FPS Fixed and a bitrate of at least 20 Mbps.

You can use the Oculus Mirror utility as a simple way to capture your headset on a computer and leverage OBS to record the content. Alternatively, you can also capture the casting output in a web browser. The quality is lower than MQDH recording, so this workaround may be effective for short-form video capture.

Research has shown that showing a user interacting with your app in 3rd person helps engage viewers and better represent the experience as opposed to a trailer that only shows first person POV.

Capturing third person footage with an MR app does come with some considerations. Whereas a VR app has an entirely virtual environment where users can be captured on a green screen and composited into the VR world. MR applications utilize the player’s real world environment, meaning you need to instead composite the virtual objects into the real world camera feed since you aren’t able to easily remove the player from the background without a green screen.

This means you need to employ some custom processes to make third person footage true to the game, which we mention later in this document.

There are a few methods that more advanced developers can explore to produce MR third person capture. You need to integrate the following into your set up:

Third person MRC is a fairly advanced technique. However, it can be accessible to most developers with some minor camera/rigging/lighting investments and experimentation. VR creators, like TougeVR, have great tutorials for making high-quality MRC content.

When shooting an MR application, you need to do one of two things. Either:

For those who are looking to get more technical and have access to a phone with a lidar camera, another option available to you is to use the lidar camera to get the depth data from your camera so you can properly position the mixed reality objects in front of and behind your player. Fabio with the Reality Mixer app has some great examples of this process for creators who do not have a green screen you can check out here.

It’s recommended that you export your headset captured media through the Meta Quest Developer Hub via the File Manager page. For cases where connecting through USB aren’t possible or you are using a secondary account that cannot be accessed over USB, you can use the sync option located in the options (...) menu on each video file to sync the videos recorded to your Meta app or log into your preferred file sharing solution on the browser in your headset to upload there.

To go above and beyond recording, adding in specific developer only features can help streamline the recording process. Keep in mind that all of these require additional work outside of the core functionally of your experience, so it is entirely up to you to add these features.

Here is a list of features we recommend you add to your app so the VR window on your PC has the highest quality capture.

Regardless of the method you choose, it is crucial to consider your hardware limitations, optimize your capture settings, and conduct thorough testing to ensure the best possible video quality.

By following these recommendations and considering the alternatives provided, you will be well-equipped to capture high-quality video recordings with your Meta Quest headset. Enjoy creating and sharing your immersive VR experiences.

Content should adhere to the general principles of the Meta Quest Health and Safety Guidelines.

Meta Quest products are for ages 13+. Any talent depicted using the device should be and obviously appear to be 15 or older. For mature content, the talent depicted using the device should be and obviously appear to be 18 or older.

Users should be shown wearing attire appropriate to the activity.

Users should NOT be shown in a state of obvious or implied impairment, such as:

Make sure the headset fits appropriately by

The Touch controllers’ lanyards should be around the user’s wrists while using the headset, tightened so they are neither too loose nor too tight.

All hardware for games sold on the quest store should be showing Quest hardware without any 3rd party accessories.

Users’ movements should be intentional/controlled, NOT wild, so that they are depicted as remaining within their clear play area. Boundaries should be depicted if users approach boundaries.

Users’ movements should be appropriate to the content shown. For example, lunges and squats may be appropriate for fitness content; but similar movements may not be accurate for entertainment or gaming content.

Users should be shown using content that:

Non-users should be depicted away, giving adequate space to the player, and not in the clear play space .

Pets generally should NOT be shown in the same room as users, unless they are

Meta Quest is for ages 13 and older. Any talent depicted using the device should look and be 15 and older.