Apple Posts Human Interface Guidelines for Vision Pro

Apple has updated its Human Interface Guidelines for the upcoming Vision Pro headset.

When people wear Apple Vision Pro, they enter an infinite 3D space where they can engage with your app or game while staying connected to their surroundings. As you begin designing your app or game for visionOS, start by understanding the fundamental device characteristics and patterns that distinguish the platform. Use these characteristics and patterns to inform your design decisions and help you create immersive and engaging experiences.




Best practices
Great visionOS apps and games are approachable and familiar, while offering extraordinary experiences that can surround people with beautiful content, expanded capabilities, and captivating adventures.

● Embrace the unique features of Apple Vision Pro. Take advantage of space, Spatial Audio, and immersion to bring life to your experiences, while integrating passthrough, focus, and gestures in ways that feel at home on the device.

● Consider the entire spectrum of immersion as you design ways to present your app's most distinctive moments. You can present experiences in a windowed, UI-centric context, a fully immersive context, or something in between. For each key moment in your app, find the minimum level of immersion that suits it best — don't assume that every moment needs to be fully immersive.

● Use windows for contained, UI-centric experiences. To help people perform standard tasks, prefer standard windows that appear as planes in space and contain familiar controls. In visionOS, people can relocate windows anywhere they want, and the system's dynamic scaling helps keep window content legible whether it's near or far.


● Prioritize comfort. To help people stay comfortable and physically relaxed as they interact with your app or game, keep the following fundamentals in mind.

○ Display content within a person's field of view, positioning it relative to their head. Avoid placing content in places where people have to turn their head or change their position to interact with it.

○ Avoid displaying motion that's overwhelming, jarring, too fast, or missing a stationary frame of reference.

○ Support indirect gestures that let people interact with apps while their hands rest in their lap or at their sides.

○ If you support direct gestures, make sure the interactive content isn't too far away and that people don't need to interact with it for extended periods.

○ Avoid encouraging people to move too much while they're in a fully immersive experience.

● Help people share activities with others. When you use SharePlay to support shared activities, people can view the Spatial Personas of other participants, making it feel like everyone is together in the same space.

Learn more about designing for visionOS at the link below...

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