XR Developer News - April 2025
A bit of a shorter edition this month, both because there wasn't a great deal of news and because of a vacation forcing me to keep things a bit shorter this time. Still, plenty of interesting things going on!
For my Dutch readers, be sure to check out XR Creators Connect Day (which I co-organize) on Friday, May 16th in Rotterdam. Unity, Niantic, Zappar and Blender will be joining us for a day of workshops and presentations. Should be a good one!
With that out of the way, let's get going.
Meta
Meta published the recordings of its GDC sessions. The first two in the list are the most relevant ones, then there are a few case study and technical deep dive sessions and a bunch of Horizon Worlds talks.
- The Past, Present and Future of Developing VR/MR with Meta => Chris Pruett's talk about the economics of the Horizon Store. Interesting to hear, even if you've already written the blog they posted about it earlier.
- Develop Your Next Title in VR/MR for Meta Quest and Meta Horizon OS => Useful overview session.
- Merge Realities, Multiplay Wonder: Expert Guidance on Mixed Reality Development => Covers mixed reality and the Passthrough Camera API.
- Building a Tabletop MR Game Fast: The Battlenauts Case Study => Case study about a mixed reality tabletop game.
- Meta Horizon Start Developer Story: Sugar Madness => Another case study.
- Big Swings, Big Hits: Building a Profitable Business in VR/MR => A panel about the Horizon Platform's economics.
- Design and Rendering Strategies for Blockbuster VR games - Batman: Arkham Shadow => Hardcore technical session about rendering.
- Can AI Make Your Game Better? => A panel about AI.
- Several sessions about Horizon Worlds.
- Meta also released Horizon OS v76 with some small updates and published a few blogs about the Horizon OS store and growing your user base.
New to the Meta Horizon Store from App Lab? Here are Tips for Overcoming 5 Key Challenges
Explore the top five issues developers encounter when making the switch from App Lab to the Meta Horizon Store and gain solutions to navigate these challenges successfully.
Snap
- Snap released v5.8 and v5.8.1 of Lens Studio with a lot of modest improvements and published a new introductory video about using Lens Studio.
- Reading through the Reddit AMA the team recently did, it strongly seems like WebXR support for Spectacles is likely to come out in the foreseeable future.
- Together with MIT Reality Hack and AWE, Snap is running a hackathon which runs from May 19th to June 11th.
RH x Snap LiveAR Hack at AWE - MIT Reality Hack | The Experiential Technology Ecosystem
MIT Reality Hack, Snap AR, and AWE is inviting you to create the future of public spaces and live experiences, where the digital and physical worlds collide to create unforgettable, interactive, and transformative moments.
Other XR hardware, software and news
- Niantic Studio got updated with support for image targets (related video) and improved UI support.
Introducing Image Targets in Niantic Studio: Revolutionizing Image-Based AR
Create Interactive AR Experiences from Flat, Curved, and Conical Surfaces for free —All Within Studio’s Visual Interface.
Apr 10, 2025 . 1 min read . Announcements
What’s New in Studio: Easily Create and Edit UI & 2D Graphics
Introducing a powerful new toolkit for effortlessly creating in-game UI—buttons, text, menus, and more
Apr 17, 2025 . 2 min read . Announcements
- Niantic's Lightship ARDK received update 3.13, which in itself isn't very big, but contained an important announcement that all earlier versions of the SDK are deprecated and might break 6 months from now due to back-end changes related to the Niantic Spatial / Pokemon Go split. Be sure to update in time, especially if you're using VPS or mapping back-end elements of the SDK!
- Unity released v6.1 and held a live stream diving into the changes. It also held a live stream about the mixed reality multiplayer template.
Unity 6.1: Supported Update with Enhanced Performance | Unity
The Unity 6.1 Update release brings stability & performance enhancements. Build games with powerful platform support & workflows for your next masterpiece.
- Unity is pulling the plug on Unity MARS, which always seemed a bit strange with its paid add-on model on top of the regular Unity license fees.
- Apple released v2.4 of visionOS and Apple is proactively working on adding visionOS to the open source Godot game engine!
Native visionOS platform support by rsanchezsaez · Pull Request #105628 · godotengine/godot
Dear Godot community,
I'm on Apple's visionOS engineering team, and we would like to contribute Vision Pro support to the Godot engine. This is the first PR that lays the foundation for tha…
godotengine
- On the topic of visionOS I wanted to call out the videos Justin Ryan has been publishing on his YouTube channel recently, which contain quite a few nice interviews if you're specifically interested in visionOS. Have a look!
- Pico made it a lot easier to launch on their store, by opening up self-service publishing.
PICO Now Supports Self-Publishing and Paid App Distribution for Individual Developers | PICO Developer
- I'm getting the feeling Magic Leap is transitioning more and more to an XR optics manufacturing company and moving away from a full headset + OS + ecosystem player. Case in point: compare the recent (admittedly slick) PR videos about its manufacturing teams and capabilities, to the slowdown in its major OS updates (first time in over 2 years with more than 2 months between updates).
- TikTok Effect House v4.13 was released with minor updates.
- A-Frame v1.7.1 was released with a few bugfixes.
- Zappar published a tutorial on working with Mattercraft + Immersal.
- If you're looking into how to do text input in an XR app, definitely check out an overview of a heap of relevant options by a team of researchers.
Researchers Catalog 170+ Text Input Techniques to Improve Typing in XR
Efficient text entry without an actual keyboard remains an industry-wide challenge for unlocking productivity use-cases in XR headsets. Researchers have created a comprehensive catalog of existing text entry techniques to codify different methods and analyze their pros and cons. By making the catalog freely available, the researchers hope to give others a head start on …
Road to VR
- Standard body Khronos Group held a 3D on the Web event. It might be interesting to check out if you frequently work with their standards, such as glTF.
- Gabriele Romagnoli had an interesting interview with Meshy CEO Ethan Hu which gives a good impression of where generative AI for 3d assets is at right now.
Upcoming XR events
- May 16, 2025 - XR Creators Connect Day in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Full day version of the XR meetup in NL which I co-organize. Unity, Niantic, Zappar and Blender giving workshops and presentations. For my Dutch readers: hope to see you there!
- May 20-21, 2025 - Google I/O in Mountain View, California, USA.
- May 26, 2025 - CIIIC conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
- June 2-5, 2025 - Unreal Fest in Orlando, Florida, USA.
- June 9-13, 2025 - Apple's WWDC in Cupertino, California, USA
- June 10-12, 2025 - AWE USA in Long Beach, California, USA.
- August 24-26, 2025 - AWE Asia in Singapore. Call for speakers until May 15th.
- September 17-18, 2025 - Meta Connect.
- December 8-10, 2025 - United XR Europe in Brussels, Belgium. A new event resulting from a merger between AWE EU and Stereopsia. Call for Speakers closes July 15.
A bit about this newsletter
Each month I try to round up all the interesting developments in the XR developer landscape. New hardware and software releases, events, interesting tooling, etc. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, for instance if I missed anything which definitely should be in this monthly round up next time.
