XR Developer News - May 2025
With Google I/O happening and Android XR slowly working its way to launch, it's no surprise XR developer news was mostly dominated by Google. Next month should be interesting as well, with WWDC and AWE USA on the horizon. Enjoy!
AI, AI, AI, XR, AI. I suppose that's how I would summarize Google I/O this year. While all the AI stuff is fascinating, that's not what we're here for. Luckily there was quite a bit of XR on stage as well. If you missed it, check out the keynote (13 minute section starting around 1:37:45) and the related blog post.
Shahram Izadi
I'm a bit of two minds on Android XR though. First of all because Google's marketing is putting one brand on two very distinct things. The OS and developer platform on Project Moohan and the HUD glasses will be radically different, so the purposeful mixing of the brand seems to set it up for disappointment when Moohan ships later in the year and the glasses still turn out to be very far away from being a real consumer product.
That brings us directly to my second gripe: although the HUD glasses demo is really great, Google has been teasing this sort of prototype for quite a while now, and is just a bit too happy letting people's imagination run wild with flashy tech demos that are easily years away from actually shipping and no details whatsoever on what developers will be able to do with it. Call me conservative, but I prefer the Snap Spectacles route, with a device I can actually buy - no wait, rent - and work with, even if it's just a developer kit.
When you peel away the layers of marketing, and look at the actual XR developer content at I/O that's close to shipping, there was a bit of news, but not that much. On the Project Moohan-type headset side of Android XR, Developer Preview 2 shipped.
There were also two developer sessions about the frameworks for native Android developers, one about the (2D) basics, with a focus on Jetpack Compose, the other about more advanced (3D) topics, such as glTF, ARCore and a bit of Unity.
A to-be-honest-quite-dumb side-effect of the Google vs Meta struggle in the XR space is that if you're an Android developer looking to bring your 2D Android app to mixed reality, you're now actually forced to implement two different frameworks for that, depending on whether you're targeting Android XR (which has the SDKs promoted in the videos above) or Meta Horizon OS (which has its Spatial SDK for exactly that same purpose). If only we'd come up with concepts to avoid this kind of chaos, like open standards or cooperation...
Unity meanwhile is also continuing work on its Android XR integration, which is progressing nicely and made a repository of samples available.
android
One interesting element was the announcement that Google will be adding support for the Khronos Group's glTF Interactivity Extension specification later in the year. My hope is that that standard will make it a bit easier to not only use 3d assets across game engines, but also part of the logic related to them.
One thing which I'm reserving judgement on, mostly because so much is unclear until more details are announced at AWE USA in June, was the announcement of a new Android XR device by XReal. It seems these are their typical bulky, tethered-to-a-compute-puck glasses, running the full Project Moohan-type Android XR OS, and are intended for indoor use instead of outdoor. So not really 'smart glasses', but much more for the types of use cases Magic Leap 2 would have. Curious, might be interesting, and luckily we'll know more in two weeks or so.
David Heaney
One obligatory final note: as with anything Google, independent of how large its interest in the XR space is at the moment, your future mileage may vary. So if you decide to invest time, money and energy in the Android XR platform, probably wise to keep that in mind.
Meta
Things were a bit more business-as-usual on the Meta side of the XR world:
- The Passthrough Camera API has been publicly released and can now be used by apps in the Meta Horizon Store.
- Horizon OS v77 was released, containing an overhaul of the main OS UI and a few other updates.
- Meanwhile there was a bit of a riot around the quality of recent Horizon OS releases and their impact on app performance, which Meta's CTO responded to.
- Meta is working on improved models for 3d asset generation.
- A new mixed reality Motif was published, dealing with colocated experiences.
- The source code of the North Star demo app has been released, even though it perhaps isn't flawless.
- Meta released and updated a few UI sets for designers. Useful if you're working on designing Spatial SDK apps for instance.
- Dilmer Valecillos, nowadays with Meta, published a video exploring Meta's Hand Tracking with Microgestures.
- If you're looking to publish to the Meta Horizon Store, check out these resources.
Other XR hardware, software and news
- Unity put together a really useful overview of all that's new in its XR support, especially the updates that happened in and around Unity 6.1. The first Unity 6.2 Beta is now also available.
- If you're working on developing something with multiplayer and VR in Unity, be sure to check out a recent article by Antony Vitillo on the topic.
Skarredghost
- Niantic closed its deal with Scopely for the sale of Pokemon Go, marking the formal 'day 1' of Niantic Spatial, as they put it. The details of what they'll be working on are a bit hard to parse amongst the 'large geospatial model' terminology, but it seems their VPS platform is still also very much a core focus for them.
- The 8th Wall side of the business introduced a radical pricing change after many years of charging seriously high fees for launching commercial projects on the platform. There are still several pricing caveats, but it's definitely a good step towards making 8th Wall and Niantic Studio more accessible. It also published some new learning materials.
- Snap released Lens Studio 5.9 and the May update (v5.61) to its Snap Spectacles. Great to see how they keep working on improving Spectacles significantly with each release.
May Snap OS Update - With A Lens Explorer Refresh
by u/Spectacles_Team in Spectacles
- Apple released visionOS 2.5.
- Pico released v3.0 of its Native XR SDK and an interesting open source XR Profiling Toolkit.
- Unreal Engine keeps gradually improving its support for visionOS.
- Godot meanwhile is going ahead full steam, adding the first elementary visionOS support, improving its OpenXR support, and adding Meta Quest Camera Passthrough API support. Great to see them on fire, delivering at such a rapid pace!
- TikTok Effect House 4.14 was released.
Before we close off, I wanted to give a huge shoutout to Unity, Niantic, Zappar and Blender for participating in XR Creators Connect Day 2025 (which I co-organize) in Rotterdam, NL this month!
Upcoming XR events
- June 2-5, 2025 - Unreal Fest in Orlando, Florida, USA.
- June 9-13, 2025 - Apple's WWDC in Cupertino, California, USA
- June 10-12, 2025 - AWE USA in Long Beach, California, USA.
- 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. Call for Speakers closes July 15.
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.
