XR Developer News - February 2026

A short edition this month as we're slowly moving out of the winter slump and gearing up for tech conference season, with GDC up first. This month a bunch of regular updates across the XR developer ecosystem, so read on to catch up!

Oh, and if you're based in the Netherlands or Belgium, join us for the next edition of the XR Creators Connect NL meetup I co-organize! March 19th in Breda, with the great speakers Stijn Spanhove, Philipp Sieben (PixelArtistry) and Roger ter Heide (ImproVive). Hope to see you there!

Meta

• Meta released v85 of Horizon OS and the related SDKs. Starting with the next release they're switching naming scheme to a more typical format indicating major and minor releases, with v2.1 now being on the Public Test Channel.
  • A big change that is going on is the switch of the main OS UI to the new Navigator.
• The Meta Horizon Start program published a video covering what was new in v83 for developers.

• With all the recent changes at Meta, its VP of Content published a blog outlining Meta's current view of and plans with the ecosystem. Not much new in there, most of it had been covered in interviews by CTO Andrew Bosworth already, but it gives a decent overview of their official position.
• Oscar Falmer shared some interesting updates about the Wearables Device Access Toolkit, with it going to v0.4.0 (which adds support for the Display glasses) and an overview of some projects built with it.

Other

• Apple released visionOS 26.3 and a 26.4 beta which adds support for Foveated Streaming, which is an interesting addition.
• Meanwhile Unity launched its visionOS 26 support and gave a heads up about some visionOS changes that might impact existing apps.
• Unity also published another XR roundup post on its forums focused on Unity 6.3.
• Pico is gearing up for the launch of its reported new high-end headset Project Swan and will show it in a developer session at GDC.
• Snap Lens Studio v5.18 was released, although it's a non-Spectacles version.
• Godot v4.6 was released. If you're into Godot, check out the GodotCon conference in April in Amsterdam.
• Google published an interesting article about designing user interfaces for smart glass displays.

How to Design for Transparent Screens - Google Design

Behind-the-scenes of designing the next generation of interfaces for AI glasses with displays—including Jetpack Compose Glimmer, the newly launched design system for Android extended reality (XR) experiences.

Google Design

• Gabriele Romagnoli had an interesting interview with the head of product marketing at Niantic Spatial, giving a good overview of what Niantic is up to at the moment.

• Khronos Group is working on adding support for gaussian splats to the glTF standard.

Upcoming XR events

• March 9-13, 2026 - GDC in San Francisco, California.
• March 19th, 2026 - XR Creators Connect NL #8 in Breda, The Netherlands, the next edition of the XR meetup I co-organize!
• April 8-10, 2026 - Laval Virtual in Laval, France.
• April 23-24, 2026 - GodotCon in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• May 19-20, 2026 - Google I/O in Mountain View, California.
• June 15-18, 2026 - AWE USA in Long Beach, California.
• June 23-25, 2026 - Immersive Tech Week in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
• December 7-9, 2026 - UnitedXR Europe in Brussels, Belgium

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.

And if you need expertise in the XR space, know that we offer exactly that at DNA.inc where I'm Head of XR, so don't hesitate to get in touch!