XR Developer News - March 2025
Even though the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco isn't an XR event specifically, the major XR platforms tend to converge on it and use it as a podium for XR developer news. Lots of interesting news therefore this month.
Before we dive in, I just wanted to give a shoutout to Ivan Aguilar for sending in a steady stream of great XR news suggestions. Much appreciated!
Meta
- As rumoured for a while, Meta used GDC as the occasion to release access to the video passthrough camera feed as an experimental API, including samples and video tutorials. While the long-term possibilities are intriguing and there has been a lot of great enthusiasm, the computer vision / machine learning knowledge required to put this to effective use is significant, so it will take a while before we really see this result in consumer-ready experiences.
- Meta also used GDC to share more information on the evolution of the economics of the Horizon platform with the entry of Quest 3S into the market. The overarching message (I'm very crudely summarizing here) is that the most recent audience growth is primarily in younger demographics, which tend to skew towards free-to-play experiences. It's an interesting read, worth the time to understand the nuances.
The Past, Present, and Future of Developing VR and MR with Meta
Take a journey through the past, present, and future of developing VR and MR as Meta’s Director of Games Chris Pruett shares evolving ecosystem trends and audience insights.
- Meta had a full program at GDC, although I haven't seen the videos being published yet. It did release a few blog posts covering some of what it shared at GDC, about development, design and Worlds.
GDC 2025: Emerging Opportunities in MR/VR on Meta Horizon OS
Discover some of the opportunities we shared at GDC 2025 to accelerate your development process, level up your skillset and expand your reach with Meta Horizon OS.
GDC 2025: Strategies and Considerations for Designing Incredible MR/VR Experiences
Dive into design and rendering tips from GDC 2025. Hear from the teams behind hit games like Batman: Arkham Shadow and Demeo and learn how you can make your mixed reality and VR games more enjoyable…
GDC 2025: Insights for Creating, Monetizing and Growing on Meta Horizon Worlds
Get insights from GDC on how Meta Horizon Worlds’ unique development path enables you to build quickly, broaden your reach, earn revenue and measure success.
- There was a lot of ruckus around Meta's OVRPlugin, while being positioned as implementing OpenXR, not actually being able to run on competitors' headsets, going right against the philosophy of OpenXR. The details get quite technical at times, but if you're interested, the most complete explanations I encountered were at UploadVR and Voices of VR. The situation was resolved by Meta changing its position to recommending the standard Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot OpenXR implementations instead of its OVRPlugin.
Meta and OpenXR
Learn how Meta is supporting OpenXR and developers through its game engine integrations and contributions to OpenXR standards.
- Meta launched Meta Horizon managed solutions, basically the newest iteration of its mobile device management solution. While great to see that business deployments are receiving serious attention, there is a cost implication: if you were already using a third-party MDM, like ArborXR or ManageXR, you now also need to pay Meta a per-device recurring fee, so your costs are going up. In a related area, its Meta for Education offering went live.
- Following the recent release of Horizon OS v74, the related SDK versions were also released.
- A new Mixed Reality Motif was published about Instant Content Placement.
- Whenever there is news about Project Aria, the number of mistaken headlines about Meta announcing new augmented reality glasses is off the charts, just like this month. Although Aria are only a glasses-based sensor research platform, without any display, they are very interesting as over the years we'll likely see those sensors migrate one by one into products like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The actual news here concerns a second generation of Aria, with a range of upgrades to the sensor suite, compute, battery-life and audio. An interesting look into the far future of AR glasses.
Introducing Aria Gen 2: Unlocking New Research in Machine Perception, Contextual AI, Robotics, and More | Meta Quest Blog
Today, we’re excited to announce the next step in the Project Aria journey: the introduction of Aria Gen 2 research glasses.
Snap
- Snap's Spectacles have been out for six months now and the company took some time to celebrate the moment.
- It used the occasion to launch Spectacles Community Challenges: recurring monthly contests for Spectacles Lenses, with a $22K prize pool each month.
Join Spectacles Community Challenges
First edition coming April 1st — stay tuned!
- Snap OS for Spectacles received update v5.60 (release notes, video) with a number of new example lenses and sample projects, improvements to geolocation and hand tracking and much more. Lens Studio also received an update to v5.7 with some modest improvements and a new beginner's tutorial.
Niantic
- The big news from Niantic this month was its decision to sell off most of its gaming activities, including Pokemon Go, to focus exclusively on its spatial technology. Basically it's betting the farm on its augmented reality and mapping technology, and now has a massive war chest to pursue that bet.
Niantic’s Next Chapter: Introducing a New Home for Niantic Games and a New Future for Niantic Spatial Inc.
- Part of that strategy is 3D scanning app Scaniverse and the new app 'Into the Scaniverse' to view the gaussian splats made with it on Meta Quest. Check out Kent Bye's interview with Joel Udwin which goes in-depth about it.
#1525: Niantic’s “Into the Scaniverse” Maps Over 50k Gaussian Splats from Around the World on Quest and WebXR – Voices of VR Podcast
kentbye
- On the 8th Wall side of the business a small update to Niantic Studio was released and a few workshop and case study videos were published.
Other XR hardware, software and news
- Unity shared the latest overview of its 2025 roadmap at GDC, with a bit of XR in it. Check out the two and a half minute section starting at timecode 14:00 in the relevant video, about Android XR and Meta Quest.
- Godot keeps plugging along working on improving its XR support, which it's able to invest in significantly due to Meta's financial support. Great to see the XR support in the engine continuing to mature.
Godot XR update - February 2025 – Godot Engine
New plugin releases for Godot XR.
Godot Engine
- Varjo hosted a live stream in which it went in-depth on the latest news related to its high-end XR technology. Notable was the addition of a $2500 yearly subscription to access advanced mixed reality features of its hardware.
- Google finally released some videos of its Android XR launch event, months after the fact, although for some unknowable reason it decided to add some extremely annoying background music, making them a pain to listen to.
- Google also updated its ARCore Extensions to v1.48 with support for Unity 6 and AR Foundation 6.
- Babylon.js 8.0 was released, with many improvements including WebXR Depth Sensing.
Introducing Babylon.js 8.0
Our mission is to build one of the most powerful, beautiful, simple, and open web rendering engines in the world. Today, web graphics and…
Babylon.js
- TikTok Effect House v4.12 was released.
- Gabriele Romagnoli continued his run of very strong interviews in his XR AI Spotlight podcast, including Jeri Ellsworth of Tilt Five, Connell Gauld of Zapworks and Jack Wang of Kiri Engine.
- And finally, in a shameless plug (which I suppose is one of the benefits of running your own newsletter), I'm experimenting with visual positioning system (VPS) tech and showing city data at scale in augmented reality. First steps in Unity on iOS with Niantic World Pose and Google ARCore Geospatial API. Next up: Snap Spectacles. If you're into this sort of tech / use case or have interesting data to visualize in such a way, get in touch through LinkedIn!
Upcoming XR events
- April 9-11, 2025 - Laval Virtual in Laval, France.
- April 14, 2025 - Unity's Unite 2025 in Seoul, South Korea.
- May 16, 2025 - XR Creators Connect Day in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Details coming soon. Full day version of the XR meetup in NL which I co-organize. For my Dutch readers: hope to see you there!
- May 20-21, 2025 - Google I/O, perhaps featuring Android XR.
- 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.
