Mobile Safe Area

Where scene UI can safely live on mobile — clear of the system HUD and the device's hardware-reserved margins.

On a phone, two things eat into the screen space your UI can safely use:

• The Decentraland system HUD — the app overlays its own controls (joystick, chat, profile, camera controls, the interaction button). Scene UI placed under them clashes visually and competes for taps. These regions are mapped out in Reserved margins below.

• The device's hardware-reserved margins — the notch or camera cutout, status bar, home indicator, and rounded corners. The SDK keeps UI clear of these automatically with the ScreenInsetArea component.

The mobile safe area is what's left over — where scene UI can live without clashing with either.

All values below use normalized coordinates [0.0 – 1.0] based on a 1600 × 720 px landscape reference resolution. Always use normalized values so your layout adapts to any screen size. Always verify on a real device using the preview QR code.

Reserved margins

The system HUD occupies the outer edges on all four sides. Do not place scene UI inside these regions:

Edge	Reserved for	Size
Left	Chat, joystick, emotes	480 px — 30% of width
Right	Profile, action buttons	400 px — 25% of width
Top	System bar	58 px — 8% of height
Bottom	System bar	58 px — 8% of height

// Minimum safe insets (normalized)
margin: { left: 0.30, right: 0.25, top: 0.08, bottom: 0.08 }

Reserved regions on the mobile client: left side, top-right, and bottom-right are owned by system controls.

Center safe zone

The recommended area for all scene UI is the center band of the screen. It gives you 720 × 605 px of usable space:

	Pixels	Normalized
x start	480 px	0.30
x end	1200 px	0.75
y start	58 px	0.08
y end	662 px	0.92

// Center safe zone (normalized)
safeArea: {
  x: [ 0.30, 0.75 ],  // 480 – 1200 px  →  45% of screen width
  y: [ 0.08, 0.92 ]   // 58 – 662 px    →  84% of screen height
}

The center safe zone: 720 × 605 px, from x 30%–75% and y 8%–92%.

Right-side gap (small elements only)

Between the Profile avatar (top-right) and the action button cluster (bottom-right) there is a narrow gap where small UI elements — icons, counters, status indicators — can live. Keep elements here to a maximum of 48 × 48 px to avoid crowding the controls.

	Pixels	Normalized
x range	1200 – 1600 px	0.75 – 1.0
y range	158 – 360 px	0.22 – 0.50

// Right-side gap (normalized)
rightGap: {
  x: [ 0.75, 1.0  ],  // 1200 – 1600 px
  y: [ 0.22, 0.50 ]   // 158 – 360 px
}

Where to put scene UI

• Center of screen — actionable dialogs, anything the player needs to read and respond to.

• Top-center — non-actionable messages, status, and notifications.

• Center-bottom (above the interaction button) — context-sensitive hints.

• Right-side gap — small icons or counters only (max 48 × 48 px).

Why it matters

Scene UI that overlaps the reserved regions will:

• Be partially hidden behind the joystick, interaction button, or camera controls.

• Compete for taps with the system controls — players will accidentally trigger one or the other.

• Make your scene feel broken on mobile, which hurts featuring and retention.

Device hardware insets (ScreenInsetArea)

The reserved margins above belong to the Decentraland system HUD. Separately, the device hardware reserves screen space for the notch or camera cutout, the status bar, the home indicator, and rounded corners. UI drawn underneath these is partly hidden or hard to tap.

The ScreenInsetArea component keeps your UI clear of these hardware margins automatically, reading the current insets the device reports. Import it from @dcl/sdk/react-ecs and wrap the UI you want to protect:

import ReactEcs, { ReactEcsRenderer, UiEntity, ScreenInsetArea } from '@dcl/sdk/react-ecs'
import { Color4 } from '@dcl/sdk/math'

export function setupUi() {
  ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer(() => (
    <ScreenInsetArea>
      {/* A child sized 100% × 100% fills the safe inset area exactly */}
      <UiEntity
        uiTransform={{ width: '100%', height: '100%' }}
        uiBackground={{ color: Color4.create(0, 0, 0, 0.5) }}
      />
    </ScreenInsetArea>
  ))
}

ScreenInsetArea positions itself absolutely using the inset values the device reports, so the positionType and position fields of its uiTransform are reserved — any value you set for them is ignored. All other uiTransform properties (padding, flexDirection, alignItems, …) and UI components (uiBackground, onMouseDown, …) work as usual. The component reacts automatically when the insets change, for example on rotation or when system bars appear or hide.

📱 Mobile only: ScreenInsetArea only changes anything on the mobile client, where the device reports real inset values. On the desktop client the insets are (0, 0, 0, 0), so the component has no effect and your UI renders exactly as it would without it. It's safe to leave in cross-platform UI code.

Related

• UI best practices for mobile

• Detect the platform from code — use isMobile() to swap layouts.

• On-screen UI

• UX & UI Guide