Designers usually bring a flat-screen UI into VR and it feels wrong immediately. The fixes are mostly about distance and physical size.
Distance. Do not put UI closer than about a metre. Human eyes struggle to converge on very near objects and it causes eye strain quickly. Two to three metres is comfortable for a main menu.
Size scales with distance. Because it is placed in the world, text must get physically bigger the further away it is to stay readable. The mistake is authoring a canvas at screen pixel sizes and pushing it into the world; everything ends up tiny. Author at world scale and check it in the headset, not on the monitor.
Do not lock UI to the head. A menu welded to the face follows every small movement and feels oppressive, and you cannot look away from it. Better options: place it in the world where the player can look away, or attach it to the hand or wrist so the player brings it up deliberately.
Keep it inside the comfortable field. Content that requires turning the head far to read gets missed. Keep important things near the centre of view.
Curve long panels. A flat panel wider than about 60 degrees has edges further away than its centre, which reads as distorted. Curving it around the viewer fixes that.
Contrast harder than you think. Headset displays and lens behaviour wash out low-contrast text far more than a monitor does. Thin light grey on white will be unreadable.
Aim rays, not mouse cursors. Pointing with a controller is not as precise as a mouse. Make targets generous, and give clear hover feedback so people know what they are about to select.
The only reliable test is putting it on your head. It is astonishing how often a menu that looks fine in the editor is unusable in the headset.
Distance. Do not put UI closer than about a metre. Human eyes struggle to converge on very near objects and it causes eye strain quickly. Two to three metres is comfortable for a main menu.
Size scales with distance. Because it is placed in the world, text must get physically bigger the further away it is to stay readable. The mistake is authoring a canvas at screen pixel sizes and pushing it into the world; everything ends up tiny. Author at world scale and check it in the headset, not on the monitor.
Do not lock UI to the head. A menu welded to the face follows every small movement and feels oppressive, and you cannot look away from it. Better options: place it in the world where the player can look away, or attach it to the hand or wrist so the player brings it up deliberately.
Keep it inside the comfortable field. Content that requires turning the head far to read gets missed. Keep important things near the centre of view.
Curve long panels. A flat panel wider than about 60 degrees has edges further away than its centre, which reads as distorted. Curving it around the viewer fixes that.
Contrast harder than you think. Headset displays and lens behaviour wash out low-contrast text far more than a monitor does. Thin light grey on white will be unreadable.
Aim rays, not mouse cursors. Pointing with a controller is not as precise as a mouse. Make targets generous, and give clear hover feedback so people know what they are about to select.
The only reliable test is putting it on your head. It is astonishing how often a menu that looks fine in the editor is unusable in the headset.