To create a submit button on the web, you just need to define where it is, how it looks and what happens when someone presses or hovers over it.

In virtual reality, you also have to figure out how it sounds, how it’s lit, and how it should interact with other elements in a scene. You need to decide what it should feel like to push a button, and, on different VR platforms, the button will need to be triggered by gazing at it, pointing a laser pointer at it, or simply by walking up and touching it.

And that’s just the first set of decisions you’ll have to make.

Over the last several years, we’ve developed more than 100 digital products for clients as varied as Capital One, Logitech and his Holiness the Dalai Lama. In 2016, much of our focus has been on virtual reality, and learning what’s possible with this new medium.

It’s clear to us that there are real use cases for VR, that the ecosystem needed to build VR products has hit an inflection point, and that businesses need to start thinking about what it could mean for them, similar to the way they had to when smartphone apps first emerged.

We’ve also learned that building apps for VR is a bigger leap than moving from the web to mobile. In particular, the winning use cases will be harder to define, apps will require more prototyping and less on-paper planning, and product teams will need new skills and to work more collaboratively than past efforts have required.

Businesses will also need to navigate a fractured landscape, where terminology isn’t well defined and the standards wars that have shaped previous platform shifts haven’t yet played out.

The term virtual reality refers to a lot of different types of content and platforms. Here’s our breakdown.

Our experience so far has also convinced us that VR projects that don’t account for these and other differences are more likely to run long, over budget, and under-deliver against the original vision.

Here, we share how we’ve come to approach VR projects. We share how we conceive projects, approach development and structure teams. We also discuss how we think about the kinds of products that are all lumped into VR and the range of players and platforms available.

Will this be better in VR?

Many of the techniques that work for 3D gaming translate well to virtual reality. But you can’t take a 3D game, port it to a VR platform, and call it done. That’s even more true for non-game apps.

Think back to when developers started to redesign desktop apps for mobile. The successful ones didn’t just replicate what they did on the web — they figured out how to take advantage of touch, location, SMS, and a built in camera.

Virtual reality offers a 360 degree canvas and provides a full sensory experience. It plays with our sense of space, engages us with immersive audio, and even provides feedback by touch in the case of platforms that use touch-sensitive haptics.

Before building for VR, you need to understand how you’ll take advantage of these capabilities and why your app will be better because of them. Specifically, ask yourself these questions:

• Can I convey something in an immersive experience that I can’t in another medium?

• Once the novelty of VR has worn off, will this experience still be valuable?

• Will VR make what I want to do more effective?

• Will it make it more affordable?

These are tough questions to answer, in part because there aren’t yet a lot of reference points.

Flight simulators are a multibillion dollar industry with a highly specialized VR system that’s proven the benefits of mimicking the cockpit of a plane. The Stanford Human Interaction Lab is exploring the ways VR creates empathy for various social groups, a project that could eventually replace the HR training of today. NASA is using VR to train astronauts and technicians as well as for planning missions and simulating life on Mars.

A good VR experience conveys emotion and uses timing, space, lighting, sound, and interaction to transport people into the world you create. These things aren’t usually top of mind for makers of non-game apps. For example, heights in VR can induce physical reactions like sweaty palms and vertigo. Business applications probably don’t want to make people feel this way.

All of which is to say, you may have a sense of what you want your product to do, or how you want people to use it. But figuring out how to translate that to VR requires a new way of thinking.

That’s why, when we develop VR products, we’ve found it’s helpful to focus not just on what you want your app to do, but on how do you want it to be experienced.

Building a good VR experience

There aren’t yet a set of established best practices to turn to for creating the experience you want. So for now, we’ve found the best way to deal with the countless unknowns and challenges we encounter on a virtual reality project is to experiment.

With VR, what works well on paper may not work in practice. Many times, developers and designers won’t even know what’s possible without actually trying it. In fact, it isn’t really even possible to construct paper wireframes — you’d need to cover an entire room.

With VR, it’s important to get into the digital prototype as quickly as you can. For now, we recommend rapid proof of concept experiments, combined with close communication between developers, designers, and other stakeholders.

As agile process adherents, we typically start by prioritizing a list of features that we feel are critical to a project’s success. These may be mechanics that we’re uncertain will work in VR or major technical challenges that we’ll need to address for the project to succeed. Next, developers and designers prototype solutions to each challenge over a week long sprint. At the end of the week, they’ll demo the idea to the larger team, document and refine their findings, and reprioritize as needed.

The key with these experiments is to explore the key mechanics of the experience you want to build. Don’t worry about code quality and ignore good graphics. Just ask yourself: What’s the smallest, simplest version of this idea that will let us test our hypothesis?

Once you’ve run a number of these experiments, your team will get an idea of what types of experiences meet your goals and which fall flat. You’re going to learn a lot about how VR works in these first few weeks, so we recommend using them to refine your vision. Keep asking yourself what kind of experience you want to create.

Bear in mind, this isn’t a one time process. The best practices of VR are years from crystallizing and you’ll want to continue to experiment and iterate on a continual basis, regardless of the number of projects you create.

The right team

Creating a polished, fully immersive VR experience takes a small army. You’ll need developers skilled in a 3D engine like Unity or Unreal, UX and UI designers, technical artists with experience creating 3D models, animations, particles, and lighting, and QA experts who understand how to best test the the space you’re building. If you’re looking to create a fully immersive experience, you’ll also need sound engineers, voice actors, creative writers, and even videographers.

We recommend starting with a core team of technical experts and designers with extensive 3D experience. While VR is too new to have real experienced experts, many people with backgrounds in gaming and film are already prepared for many of the challenges you’ll face in VR projects.

You can then rely on them to know when it’s time to bring in specialists. For instance, you may not need an audio person from day one, but you need to have a good enough understanding of your timeline to have a sense of when you’ll need one.

We’ve borrowed the role of a producer in the video game industry so that we have one person that’s responsible for the overall experience and creating cohesion across disciplines. Outside of creating a dedicated job, we’ve found that product managers tend to naturally fill these roles.

A bright future

The possibilities for VR are nearly infinite. So are the challenges.

For many businesses, limited budgets, lack of experienced people, and the need to build such a large and diverse team in order to deliver high quality experiences will be limiting factors. However, the same was said about early web technologies and look where we are now.

As product people, it’s our job to be looking over the horizon for what comes next. At Presence, we feel strongly that VR will be bigger than mobile and it’s up to us to help create ways for our clients to be successful in this new medium.

Building a good product still comes back to the fundamentals that we’re all experienced with. And as people create a lot of amazing (and mediocre) experiences, we’ll discover new processes and techniques that help us meet this emerging challenge.