XR Developer News - March 2026
As we're getting out of the winter season, news in the XR developer space is starting to ramp up again. Meta is busy as ever, Pico is ramping up for Project Swan, Snap is chugging along and pretty soon we'll be in tech conference season again.
One thing that made me sad this week was the demise of Lynx. I really hoped they would manage to pull off the launch of the R2, but it seems they've now truly reached the end of the road after a troubled history over the last few years. One could argue that if there was one company we should have supported in Europe considering all the talk of digital autonomy, Lynx should have been that company.
Meta
- Meta had a big presence at GDC, with a bunch of sessions (day 1, day 2, roundup) and the capstone as usual the talk by Chris Pruett. A written summary of his talk is up already, but in my experience it's worth watching the video when that comes online, as it gives good insights into Meta's internal thinking. That video and all the others should become available in the next few weeks.
GDC 2026 Highlights: What’s Next on Meta Horizon OS
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- The Meta Horizon Start Program YouTube channel keeps pushing out solid videos, such as a roundup of the v85 Meta SDK updates.
- Horizon OS v2.3 is on the Public Test Channel. Meanwhile on the Horizon OS blog, Meta announced FrameSync.
- On the glasses side of Reality Labs, v0.5.0 of the Wearables Device Access Toolkit was released and you can now use it with all of Meta's glasses that have been released so far. The glasses themselves received an OS update to v23, which especially for the display version was significant.
- An interesting thing on the glasses SDK side is how Meta is explicitly making its docs and tooling suitable for usage with AI-coding-assistants, by offering plain text .md versions of its docs for instance.
Other
- In a sad (but not entirely surprising, considering its past challenges) turn of events, French MR/VR hardware company Lynx appears to have gone bankrupt, ending hopes of their R2 coming out. I'm truly sorry to see them go, as it would have been very healthy for the market to have them present as an alternative to the bigger players.
- Speaking of bigger players, Pico teased its upcoming Project Swan headset as part of its Pico OS 6 announcement.
- There's one pet peeve I keep running into, which is the need all the major players apparently feel to all create their own unique framework for extending flat Android apps with spatial capabilities. Meta has one, Google has one, and Pico now also has one. Which means that if you want to support all of those, you're implementing a bunch of different, competing frameworks to do exactly the same thing. Some industry standardisation here would be extremely helpful.
PICO Unveils OS 6 and Previews 2026 Flagship “Project Swan”: Launching Global Early Access Program | PICO Developer
- Snap posted an interesting deep dive on its interaction and interface frameworks for Spectacles, Alessio Grancini held a 3 hour marathon stream on building Spectacles lenses with AI-coding tools and Snap posted a blog on building WebAR with Camera Kit.
Building the Spatial Interaction and Interface Frameworks for Specs
- Snap Lens Studio was updated to v5.19, although not for Spectacles. If you've got ideas on how Lens Studio should evolve for Spectacles development, there's a new channel to give input on that.
- Godot shared another update on its XR initiatives.
Godot XR update — March 2026 – Godot Engine
March update from the Godot XR Team, upcoming game jam, new features, and new platforms!
Godot Engine
- Niantic's 8th Wall continues its shutdown and transition to a partially open source project. While it's admirable how they're opening up as much as possible, there are still components like its SLAM functionality that will remain closed source, and components that have been cut out (e.g. VPS), making me hesitant to recommend considering this a fully viable open source solution with long term potential.
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8th Wall
- On the Lightship side of its business, Niantic released the v4.0 Beta of its NSDK, continuing its evolution into an enterprise platform.
- Apple released visionOS 2.4 with a focus on foveated streaming.
- Zappar and Wonderland Engine held a webinar on WebAR together.
- Gabriele Romagnoli had an interesting interview with Max van Leeuwen which is worth a watch.
- XR Creator Con is running its next online hackathon from April 9th to 30th, with the conclusion in Berlin at the end of June / beginning of July.
XR Creator Con 2026 – by immersive insiders
XRCC: Join the world’s biggest independent XR hackathon for XR professionals.
Upcoming XR events
- April 8-10, 2026 - Laval Virtual in Laval, France.
- April 9-30, 2026 - XR Creator Con online hackathon.
- April 23-24, 2026 - GodotCon in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
- May 19-20, 2026 - Google I/O in Mountain View, California.
- June 8-12, 2026 - Apple's WWDC in Cupertino, California.
- June 15-18, 2026 - AWE USA in Long Beach, California.
- June 23-25, 2026 - Immersive Tech Week in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
- June 30th - July 3rd, 2026 - XR Creator Con on-site hackathon and conference in Berlin, Germany.
- 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!
