XR Developer News - July 2025

This July was perhaps the slowest month in XR developer news that I've seen so far, coming straight after last month's deluge of news. Everyone is clearly on vacation, and rightfully so.

Let's say you blast through the news below and are itching for something to fill your time after that during this slow period, don't be worried: most of the AWE USA session videos have been published recently, including the developer track. That should contain plenty to keep you busy!

AWE XR

The world’s #1 spatial computing event series for the AR & VR (XR) industry where you can try hundreds of the latest demos, learn from talks by top leaders, and network with peers. Upcoming Events: United XR Europe | Bruxelles, Belgium | December 8-10, 2025 AWE Asia 2026 | Singapore | February 2-4, 2026 AWE USA 2026 | Long Beach, California | June 16 - 18, 2026 ____________________________________________________________________________ AWE, the leading event for immersive technology, champions innovation, inclusivity, and sustainability. As the top global platform for AR, VR, MR, and spatial computing, AWE showcases inspiring advancements in immersive tech for human progress. We prioritize the best experience for attendees, partners, and sponsors, and act responsibly as a business. Our focus on sustainability and accessibility influences every decision, while our commitment to diversity and inclusion ensures everyone feels welcome at AWE.

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Meta

It was a month with no major attention grabbers at Meta, but several smaller announcements, useful or important depending on what you're working on.

• Meta will be experimenting with how it shows people apps and worlds to discover, and given past drama around such changes, it decided to give an early heads-up. It also shared recommendations around session length and announced it will be enforcing some more privacy requirements.
• If audio or haptics are your thing, Haptics Studio received a big update and there's a new Wwise plugin.
• Dilmer Valecillos published a video about the new Meta Quest Runtime Optimizer. Roberto Coviello published a video about the Cryptic Cabinet sample.

Snap

• Snap released Lens Studio v5.12 (which is not for use with Spectacles)
• If you're building with Lens Studio, check out this video by Alessio Grancini on how to use genAI coding tools with it to best effect.

Unity

• Android XR is now properly supported in Unity and Unity shared a new getting started video about the platform.

• Unity released a two-part video on building an app based on the Mixed Reality multiplayer tabletop template.
• Meanwhile support for Magic Leap 2 and HoloLens 2 is gradually being deprecated.

Other XR hardware, software and news

• TikTok released Effect House v5.0, which seems to include the quite significant addition of custom scripting, if I'm interpreting it correctly. It's a bit hard to figure out for sure, because there's no announcement other than the release notes, but that would be a major enhancement.
• Pico posted an interesting article about balancing supporting OpenXR and its own SDKs.

Upcoming XR events

• August 17-19, 2025 - XRAI Hack EU at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.
• August 24-26, 2025 - AWE Asia in Singapore.
• 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.

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.

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