XR Developer News - June 2026

Snap SPECS

With AWE and WWDC happening in the same month, you can be sure it's peak XR time. Snap announcing SPECS, Apple showing visionOS 27, XREAL Aura getting closer to launch, Godot being omnipresent and a major Epic event, there's plenty in this month's roundup before we head into the slow summer period.

This week I'll be visiting XRCC Berlin as a finalist in the Snap Spectacles track, so let's catch up if you're there as well! We'll be showing off a developer platform we're working on for bringing city data into augmented reality on smart glasses and mobile, so let me know if you're curious what we're working on and we'll set something up.

Snap

SPECS! There's no doubt this was the biggest and most anticipated announcement at AWE USA this year. I distinctly remember being less than impressed when Spectacles '24 were announced, but growing to like them more and more while building for them once I got my hands on them. Something tells me it will be the same here.

Let's get something out of the way right away: this is not a consumer device. I suspect the form factor/weight/bulk of Meta Ray-Ban Display is roughly the upper bound on anything that wants to have a hope of reaching consumers. Snap forcefully trying to position SPECS as a consumer-ready device, even just for early adopters, to me feels like setting it up to chase a goal it can only fail to reach. The tech of true augmented reality glasses just isn't ready for that yet.

It does however look to be a seriously impressive step forward from Spectacles '24. A serious cut to the weight, a small improvement in field of view, hopefully some improvements to battery life (if anyone can tell me what the obfuscated marketing claim of '4 hours mixed use' means in reality, I'd love to know). I have no doubt that as a developer kit it'll be a massive upgrade, and that it might have crossed the barrier of making it viable for professional use cases, like location-based entertainment and outdoor work. I've pre-ordered a set, so let's hope it is released soon!

So, with compliments to Snap on the device, but not on the marketing and positioning, let's look at what was announced in more detail. The main event was Evan Spiegel's keynote. If you want to go straight to the good bit, skip to 15 minutes in.

CTO Bobby Murphy held a second keynote which went a bit more in depth on the software stack. The highlights include a continuation of Lens Studio's strong support for AI-assisted building, a Unity to Lens Studio migration tool and a new SDK for running C/C++ directly on SPECS.

More in depth technical sessions from the conference were also shared, covering things like the NDK and the Unity migration tool.

One important thing to note that wasn't given much attention is that it seems Spectacles '24 are basically being deprecated. They're stuck on Lens Studio 5.15 and will not be brought along to all the new Lens Studio stuff (v5.22 and further) that has been announced. If you've been renting a set, it might be time to start thinking about returning them and switching to SPECS.

On the other hand, perhaps you might be able to make something nice with them in the months remaining until the SPECS launch, and send it in to the Community Challenges to earn some income. They are running at least until the end of the year.

Apple

Speaking of companies with a knack for positioning an XR device as consumer-ready while it isn't remotely suitable for the mass market yet, Apple held its yearly developer conference WWDC. In the run up, there had been lots of rumours of scaled back investment in the visionOS domain. That might be true on the hardware side, and we might have to wait a few years for a follow-up device, but it certainly didn't show on the software side in visionOS 27.

Showing no signs of stopping in pushing visionOS forward, Apple had a whopping 15 sessions about visionOS 27 at WWDC, which have all been published. It is important to note here that Apple concentrates almost everything into this once-per-year moment, contrary to Meta or Snap which release throughout the year, so after this things will likely be pretty slow again until next year.

If you only watch one thing, be sure to check out the visionOS 27 overview session, which gives a nice rundown of the improvements. The relevant bits start around 5:50 in the video.

Then by topic there are deep dive sessions:

Several deal with Reality Composer Pro 3 and RealityKit, which I would characterise as Apple continuing to build Xcode into a proper game engine:
A few cover driving visionOS from a Mac or PC:
- Discover the Spatial Preview framework
- Use foveated streaming to bring immersive content to visionOS
Improved object tracking and new support for custom tracked devices:
- Explore enhancements to visionOS object tracking
Immersive media/video:
- Build live production tools for Apple Immersive Video
Immersive web:
3d models and USD:
- Discover USDKit and what’s new in OpenUSD
- Collaborate on structured 3D models in visionOS

Third party game engines only got a short mention, but it's interesting to see Godot getting more and more traction across XR platforms, including visionOS. We'll get back to Godot a few times this month, so read on!

To close off WWDC, Justin Ryan had a solid interview with one of the visionOS leads at Apple which is worth a look. His videos are a good source on visionOS and Vision Pro in general, so be sure to follow him if you're into that topic.

Google / XREAL

Back at AWE, XREAL, Google and Qualcomm were clearly ramping up for the release of XREAL Aura later this year. While not much new information was shared, Google held a keynote and a developer session, which gave a solid overview of everything happening in the area of Android XR. Unity now officially supports Aura in 6.5.

Oh, and again, Godot is a strong player here!

Other XR hardware, software and news

Pico is still ramping up for the release of its Project Swan headset, sharing lots of information on how to develop for its device at AWE (overview session, web session) and through its own channels (web video, game engine video).

Godot 4.7 was released and there is a new Godot asset store with a bunch of XR assets.
- As mentioned before, Godot is starting to show up seriously across the XR industry. Personally I'm quite curious to see whether that platform support will also translate into serious production apps and games being built on it by developers. It would be great to see Godot gradually grow to be an open source game engine with a level of adoption similar to Blender in 3D creation, but I think it's too soon to tell whether that will pan out.
Epic held a major Unreal Engine event. While their focus hasn't been on XR for a while, it's supported by most XR platforms, so it's good to keep an eye on what they're working on. Unreal Engine 5.8 was released and the work on 6 is progressing. Check out the keynote for the full rundown.

A-Frame v1.8.0 was released.
It seems Mixed is back with new authors. Hopefully the quality will be just as high as it was under its previous ownership.

Upcoming XR events

June 30 - July 3, 2026 - XR Creator Con on-site hackathon and conference in Berlin, Germany.
- I'll be there in Berlin on the Thursday and Friday (July 2-3), so let's meet up if you are as well! Just drop me a message through LinkedIn.
July 18, 2026 - Worlds in Action Hack in Los Angeles, California, just before SIGGRAPH.
September 23-24, 2026 - Meta Connect, Menlo Park, California.
December 7-9, 2026 - UnitedXR Europe in Brussels, Belgium.
April 7-9, 2027 - Laval Virtual in Laval, France.

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!

XR Developer News - June 2026