XR Developer News - December 2025
As we're at the end of another year, news in XR development was a bit slower than most months, but still surprisingly vibrant. Both Meta and Google opened up SDKs for glasses, and both also released new versions of their headset development tooling. Combined with plenty of smaller news, there's more than enough to read up on!
This edition marks two years of writing XR Developer News and I really enjoyed closing the second year with a panel I hosted at UnitedXR Europe with a few people I cover regularly in this newsletter. Check out the recording at the end of this month's edition.
Onwards to a fascinating 2026!
Meta
Meta closed off the year by releasing v83 (UploadVR) of Horizon OS on Quest and the related SDKs, with notable SDK updates in hand tracking.
If you want to read up on all that happened in Q4 in Horizon OS, check out Meta's quarterly recap blog post and the overview of what it shared at Unity's Unite Barcelona (video).
The Wearables Device Access Toolkit, which allows access to camera, microphone and speakers of Meta's smart glasses (which received a software update) from mobile apps is now open for testing, although not ready for production yet. While not really XR, it's still interesting to check out.
David Heaney
And if you've got some spare time during the holidays, check out XR Bootcamp's recently published list of workshops or Dilmer's recent video on hand tracking in Unity.
Google Android XR
Early in the month, Google held a big developer event, presenting the latest iteration of its Android XR SDK, a bit more on XREAL Project Aura and its first SDK for building for smart glasses with a display.
Shahram Izadi
All the sessions from the event have been published since and they contain quite a few interesting ones:
- On Google's new SDK for AI glasses (that's their marketing name for smart glasses with or without display), there are a few sessions with an introduction, about visual/UI design and about audio interaction design.
- While we're on the topic of design, there was a session on designing for see-through headsets like XREAL Project Aura as well.
- If you're in the native Android space to build for Android XR, they had that covered and the Unity side also got some love of course.
- The most surprising bit was a presentation about transitioning from Snapdragon Spaces, which at the end unexpectedly contained some big news on MRTK (yes, the one with the Microsoft HoloLens heritage). It's really interesting to see the lengths Google is going through to offer as many developers as possible a low-friction path onto Android XR.
At Unite Barcelona there also was a presentation on the topic of Android XR support in Unity, but that also covered Unity's OpenXR support more in general, so it's worth watching even if you're working on other OpenXR platforms with Unity.
Other XR hardware, software and news
- Unity released v6.3 with a few Android XR-related improvements and held a livestream about it. While that didn't cover XR, if you're a Unity user, probably good to check out.
- Epic shared a preview of the Unreal Engine 5.7 roadmap at the latest Unreal Fest. Varjo also held an interesting, very in-depth talk there on combining parts of various XR apps into one.
- At UnitedXR Europe, Snap's Daniel Wagner gave a good overview of what was improved in Snap OS 2.0. Meanwhile Lens Studio v5.17 was released, although it's not a Spectacles release.
- Niantic Spatial released v3.17 of the Lightship SDK, which introduces Kotlin & Swift versions for integration in native mobile apps, next to its existing Unity SDK.
- Meanwhile Niantic Spatial is transitioning 8th Wall into a partially open source project as it approaches end of life. It released an export tool, and shared an update on the roadmap for that. With part of the core technology only being released as a closed-source binary, which isn't going to receive any further updates and is missing support for VPS, I would only ever consider this route for keeping alive any existing projects, but not for anything new.
Dec 18, 2025 . 2 min read . Announcements
- Apple released visionOS 26.2.
- Lately I've enjoyed the Pixel Pushers podcast, which is worth checking out, for instance their recent interview with Thomas van Bouwel.
Personal highlights
- At UnitedXR Europe I had the chance to host a panel with a few people I highly respect and regularly feature on this blog: Gabriele Romagnoli, Antony Vitillo, David Heaney and Casandra Vuong. It was a blast, with these really knowledgeable people sharing their views on 2025 and 2026. Check it out!
- The Snap OS Location Tools project I shared last month won second place in the open source category of the latest Spectacles Community Challenge!
lensblogadmin
Upcoming XR events
- January 22-26, 2026 - Reality Hack at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- February 2-4, 2026 - AWE Asia in Singapore.
- April 8-10, 2026 - Laval Virtual in Laval, France.
- June 15-18, 2026 - AWE USA in Long Beach, California.
- June 23-25, 2026 - Immersive Tech Week in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
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, 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. Want to know more? Check out the about page.
