XR Developer News - July 2024

Pieter Siekerman

Jul 22, 2024 — 6 min read

Meta's multi-room support

As we're heading into the summer period, the XR developer news cycle notably slowed down. As a result this month's edition is a bit shorter than usual (also because I'm publishing a week earlier because of vacation plans). Still, there are some interesting bits included here and there!

Meta

The one company that did not slow down at all was Meta, which kept on blasting out updates throughout the month.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth had a long interview with Matthew Ball covering the road ahead for Meta (to the degree he was willing to share obviously). Very interesting read or listen (Spotify, Apple).

Meta released Quest OS (soon to be Horizon OS) v67 (release notes) and relevant SDK updates, with more steps to move it closer to visionOS' more flexible multitasking system and a bunch of smaller improvements.

As mixed reality is now a primary use case for the Quest, you can gradually see the software stack for developers catching up. For a while we were stuck in a bit of an anachronistic world of VR safety rules still being in place for MR, but thankfully things are now starting to mature. Boundary systems are becoming optional and moving throughout multiple rooms freely is becoming a normally supported use case for instance.
Meta pushed updates to the Meta Quest Developer Hub and introduced few other developer tooling improvements, including for WebXR developers and the Meta XR simulator (check out the comprehensive video and Dilmer's tutorial about that last point).

If you're doing any mixed reality capture of experiences, for example for promotional material for your Quest games or apps, Meta has decided to switch to recommending LIV.tv's tooling for that, in favor of its own.
Meta released an open source framework which seems to be primarily useful if you're building your own custom computer vision code, but the announcement is lacking in context making it a bit hard to discern the intentions behind this, especially with access to the raw camera feed on Quest not being available to third party developers.
The merging of App Lab and the Quest Store into one Horizon Store is continuing step by step. Pico by the way is following the example set by Meta.
The winners of the latest Presence Platform hackathon have been announced.
A small update to Spark Studio was released with minor improvements and another template tutorial video was published.

Apple

After WWDC's visionOS 2 bonanza in June, Apple has basically gone completely silent as we go into the summer period, resulting in hardly any Apple XR news this month. Unity's Dan Miller has been teasing some of the work they've been doing on the next version of PolySpatial and Dilmer Valecillos has a video out about the new object tracking functionality in visionOS 2, but that's really about it. Undoubtedly thing will pick up again in September as we approach the release of visionOS 2.

XR Hardware

Magic Leap released v1.8.0 (full details here) of its operating system and the related SDKs, plus some explainer videos.
- I'm not sure how long that will remain relevant though, as rumors are starting to appear that it is switching strategy to becoming "a component vendor for other companies looking to build their own headsets." One has to wonder whether a continuing support for a full XR operating system still makes sense then in the long term.

I've become a bit hesitant to include news about French company Lynx, as its road has been very troubled and it really hasn't shipped even just hundreds of headsets yet. Its recent Kickstarter update is an interesting read though, sharing some of the challenges it has faced.
Continuing this list of troubled companies, Ultraleap - which previously absorbed hand tracking sensor company Leap Motion - seems to struggling as well. One of its employees shared a very well informed video though about designing XR hand interactions.

XR Software

TikTok Effect House v4.3.0 was released with minor updates.
Vuforia v10.25 was released with some small improvements.
Three.js v166 was released.
Unity shared some interesting XR training materials, such as a video tutorial about XR Interaction Toolkit and - if videos are not your preferred way of learning - an actual e-book about developing XR experiences in Unity.

Godot organized an XR game jam which went a bit under the radar, but you can check out some of the submissions.
Niantic 8th Wall held a webinar with a deep dive into the new Niantic Studio for developing 8th Wall experiences in addition to more of an introduction session at AWE. The results of their latest hackathon were also announced.

Tip of the hat to Ivan Aguilar for suggesting this XR water shader open source project released recently by one of the creators of Vertigo 2.
Zappar held a webinar with a few well known XR creators on developing for WebXR using its tooling. Interesting to check out if you're considering using their tooling.

AWE

While I covered some of the more interesting main stage videos from Augmented World Expo in last month's edition of this roundup, many of the others tracks are now also available on their YouTube channel. I thought I'd highlight a few that I found particularly interesting:

Jason McDowell (of the awesome The AR Show podcast) gathered a very good panel on AR smart glasses technology with some true heavyweights in the industry. Very good and realistic overview of where we are with glasses technology and the (long) road ahead.

Niantic's Tory Smith talked about future improvements to Niantic's Visual Positioning System.

Another player to watch in the VPS space is Immersal, which has been chipping away at its tech for a long time as well. They had a good presentation, especially the first half, covering the VPS for web tech they're rolling out.
As the XR space becomes more mature, supporting tooling like analytics become more important, which is why talks by Cognitive3D are always interesting.

Other XR tidbits

Gabriele Romagnoli had an interesting interview with one of the creators of Puzzling Places, covering interesting info around for instance XR UX, game design and platform choices. Good stuff, like many of his interviews!

Upcoming XR events

July 29 - August 1, 2024 - SIGGRAPH, which is usually interesting with regards to the latest in computer vision research, also in the area of XR.
August 18-20, 2024 - XR Hack hackathon in Cologne.
August 26-28, 2024 - AWE Asia in Singapore.
August 26-28, 2024 - Apparently there will be a Meta and AWS Presence Platform Hackathon in Palo Alto, although details are still to be released.
September 6-8, 2024 - XR Hack hackathons in Istanbul and Stockholm.
Early September, 2024 - XR Hack hackathon in London.
September 17-19, 2024 - Snap Partner Summit and Lens Fest.
September 18-19, 2024 - Around Festival by Gravity Sketch.
September 18-20, 2024 - Unity Unite 2024 in Barcelona.
September 25-26, 2024 - Meta Connect.
October 29-30, 2024 - AWE EU in Vienna, Austria. You can submit talks until August 6th.
December 4-6, 2024 - Immersive Tech Week in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, the big yearly XR conference in the Netherlands.

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.

Hope it is useful!

XR Developer News - July 2024

Pieter Siekerman