XR Developer News - October 2024

Pieter Siekerman

28 Oct 2024 — 12 min read

Meta Horizon OS UI Set

We're past Meta Connect, but we're still very much in peak XR season, as the holiday period is still a while away. Meta is blasting out news as always (spending a billion a month will have that effect), but Snap and Niantic are also quite active and Unity 6 came out. Plenty to talk about.

This month I want to give a specific shout-out to Kent Bye of Voices of VR, who - through a herculean effort - recorded an enormous number of interesting interviews at Snap Lens Fest and Meta Connect. I'll link to the relevant episodes below, but if you enjoy his coverage, please consider supporting him through his Patreon so he can keep doing his great work.

With that out of the way, let's get stuck in!

Meta

While Meta released the keynotes and a bunch of pre-recorded videos on the day of Meta Connect, there was actually an on-site program as well, of which the recordings have now also been published to the Meta Developers YouTube Channel and the Meta Connect session overview. It's actually a much richer set of videos than the short ones that were published during the conference, so be sure to browse through them for anything interesting.

In addition to that, as noted in the intro, Kent Bye published a wealth of interview content from Meta Connect. Below I'll list the ones I found most interesting. (Apologies for them all showing the same image, which seems to be an error in the social sharing images with links from voicesofvr.com.)

That's obviously already quite the list, but depending on your specific interest, there might be a few more good ones. The full overview can be found on the Voices of VR website, specifically numbers #1468 through #1489.

With that out of the way, let's look at a few specific topics:

Meta launched its new Avatar SDK for Unity and added the new avatars to Horizon Worlds v182 and v183. The old version of the SDK will be deprecated by the end of March 2025, so if you've implemented that in your game or app, make sure you update. If you're struggling with creating your avatar, the option to generate one based on a selfie seems interesting. If you're working with the Avatar system, be sure to check out the relevant Meta Connect session.

In a major update to the Interaction SDK, Meta announced three major improvements:
- A set of standardized UI components is being released for Unity and Figma, which should make it a lot easier to create a consistent UI which matches nicely with the operating system UI. A pretty neat improvement! There's a tutorial here.

The Interaction SDK is now also available for Unreal Engine (5.4 and up). While Meta still feels like a Unity-first platform, it's good to see such signs that alternatives are receiving serious investment.
It's now possible to use (a subset of) the Interaction SDK when building for non-Meta XR platforms in Unity, because a version without hard dependencies on other Meta SDKs has been published. This should make adopting it easier if you're working on a cross-XR-platform game or app. Meta is also going in the same direction with the Haptics SDK.
Be sure to check out the first 6 minutes of the relevant Meta Connect session for an overview.

Meta's streamed gaussian splatting app Hyperscape is now available outside the US. Just tried it myself today and it's impressive to see what the tech can do. Definitely have a go if you can! Also check out the related Voices of VR interview if you're interested.

Meta is expanding its Meta Horizon Start program (which is primarily intended to support developers which already have an app on the Horizon Store) to include lifestyle apps and mobile developers.
Meta moved its developer blog to a new domain, and posted a few articles there with additional information related to Meta Connect, such as a general intro to developing for Quest, a roundup of Connect, an overview of building 2d Apps and the Spatial SDK. Very good site to keep an eye on, although I wish they added support for RSS to make it easier to track.

XR Hardware

In recent editions of this news roundup, I've tried to split the news into companies with XR hardware and those with just an XR software platform. That distinction is actually becoming quite complex, for example with Snap announcing its Spectacles 5 and Microsoft getting out of XR hardware, so I might shake it up next time. Still, for now, let's cover hardware first.

Pico, although it scaled back its short term consumer ambitions this year, is still actively building out its software stack. It released an alternative version of Unity's URP, its ideas around adaptive resolution and reinforced its support for interoperability.

Magic Leap released v1.10 of its Magic Leap OS and related SDKs. Generally speaking it has some iterative updates/improvements, but nothing shocking.

What I found interesting is the integration with Niantic's Lightship ARDK. Niantic is clearly increasing its efforts to partner up with various XR hardware platforms. In some cases it's with first party demo apps first (usually themed around Peridot, like with Meta and Snap), other times is directly with integrations like in this case. Good to keep an eye on, because it might make knowledge of the ARDK or 8th Wall a more useful thing to build up.

In the aftermath of Snap Partner Summit and Lens Fest, Snap released the videos of all the on-site Lens Fest sessions, similar to what Meta did for Meta Connect. Below the full list, so have a look if any match your interest.
Similarly, Kent Bye published an impressive list of Voices of VR interviews from the event, specifically #1453 through #1467. Below I've listed my personal favourites.

Snap also announced a Spectacles Lens Fund to which you can submit pitches for Spectacles 5 project ideas. Submissions close November 1st.

Snap released Lens Studio 5.2.0 and 5.2.1, with improvements in the area of upper body tracking and a few other minor things.

Microsoft is continuing its journey out of the XR space, as it has for a while now. Production of HoloLens 2 has ended and software support for it will be discontinued at the end of 2027.
- If you're still using one of the older Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets (don't ask about the naming: Microsoft's marketing teams have singlehandedly caused more confusion in the whole XR terminology circus than anyone else over the years), you'll be holding bricked hardware in your hands even sooner.

Chinese smart/AR glasses company Rokid has an application development contest going on. Apparently it's international, so have a look if you're interested. Might be hard to get a hold of the relevant Rokid hardware outside of China though.

XR Software

Niantic, clearly shaping up as one of the biggest XR software players with its world mapping capabilities as its unique strength, was quite active this month.
- On the web (8th Wall) side of its business, it released an update to its new Niantic Studio in September focused primarily around improved 3d model support and 2D UI tooling. It quickly followed that with another Studio update in October which added support for its VPS (Visual Positioning System).

On the Unity side, Niantic released v3.9 of the Lightship ARDK, with some VPS improvements and the addition of World Pose for more accurate positioning outside of VPS-enabled areas.

As it has been known to do frequently, it is supporting the growth of its developer ecosystem by running challenges, such as the Real World Gaming Challenge (registration) and its Niantic Studio Developer Accelerator Fund.

Unity hit a major milestone as it released Unity 6 (hoping to leave its Runtime Fee fiasco from earlier the year in the past). As part of the release several of the Unity XR packages went from 'pre' to production. In a forum post, it gave a good overview of the main XR packages and features it offers, including its support for Apple's visionOS 2.

At its Unite conference in Barcelona recently it had two interesting XR sessions, offering a good overview of what's new in XR in Unity overall, and the state of the art of Meta's Unity-specific tooling and SDKs.

Unreal had its own event with Unreal Fest Seattle (main announcements). Although Unreal is somewhat less prominent in the world of XR, it is a player of note, and it's good to be aware of what's happening at Epic. If only for the competition it offers Unity on pricing model.

Alex Coulombe, who has been one of the driving forces behind adding visionOS support to Unreal Engine, had an interesting webinar about the state of that. If you're interested, be sure to follow him. Some of his content is free, some of it is paid, but all of it is high quality.

Godot, which I would describe as Unity and Unreal's smaller open source sibling, keeps on building out its XR support. It shared a useful blog post with an overview of recent improvements and the current state of things.

Vuforia released v10.27 with small quality of life improvements.
TikTok released Effect House v4.7.0 (and 4.7.1 and 4.7.2) with a bunch of small updates.
Google released v1.46 of the ARCore Extension for AR Foundation. Also there, minor changes.
three.js v169 was released.

Upcoming XR events

October 29-30, 2024 - AWE EU in Vienna, Austria.
November 1st, 2024 - Snap Spectacles Lens Fund submission deadline.
November 29th, 2024 - Meta Horizon Start Lifestyle Experiences submission deadline.
December 4-6, 2024 - Immersive Tech Week in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, the big yearly XR conference in NL. I'll be there, so let me know if you are as well!
December 9, 2024 - Niantic Real-World Gaming Challenge submission deadline.
January 23-27, 2025 - MIT Reality Hack in Cambridge, MA.

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.

XR Developer News - October 2024

Pieter Siekerman