XR Developer News - November 2025
I always expect things to quiet down in November, and they never really do. Let's count the bombshells: Valve's Steam Frame announced, 8th Wall shutting down, Tim Sweeney in a Unity keynote... lively as ever, so read on!
In a few weeks I'll be at UnitedXR Europe, with a DNA.inc desk in the Netherlands Pavilion (booth #421), so drop by if you feel like saying hi or contact me on LinkedIn to plan something in advance. I'm also hosting a panel at the conference with Gabriele Romagnoli, Casandra Vuong and Antony Vitillo on the Monday at 16:15 on the main stage, which should be a lot of fun!
Valve
A good six years after the Valve Index, Valve is back in the VR headset space with the Steam Frame. And I say virtual reality there on purpose, as this clearly isn't a mixed reality headset, with only black-and-white passthrough and no hand tracking. This is a VR gaming rig pur sang. Although it can run things stand-alone on the headset, the primary purpose is clearly wireless PC VR streaming your Steam games library, both VR and flat games, either from your PC or the new Steam Machine.
If you're interested in the details, I would recommend the thorough coverage by UploadVR, which goes very in-depth as usual. Personally I don't expect this headset to have a massive effect on the market unfortunately, as the price is likely too high to make a difference in the stand-alone space, and PC VR will remain a niche even with this new device. Still, any serious competition to Meta is very welcome, and it's good that this device doesn't try to do exactly what the others in the space do, but plays to the strengths of Valve's ecosystem.
Meta
There wasn't one big Meta story this month, but definitely lots of little ones:
- Horizon Hyperscape, the impressive gaussian splatting room scanning app by Meta, received a very interesting upgrade. Not only can you now experience them in multiplayer, but they've also been able to move rendering from the cloud to on-device because of the new Meta Horizon Engine. That's pretty impressive!
Lisa Brown Jaloza- The Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition was announced and runs until December 9th. With $1.5 million there's a serious amount of prize money on the line spread across quite a few categories, so I expect quite a lot of entries.
- The Start program used to be pretty much limited to people who had published something to the Horizon Store, but in tandem with this competition they've opened it up to anyone, with the original tier of membership now being called 'Start partners'.
- A blog post was published about the Horizon OS v81 update that was released last month, so check it out for some extra coverage. Meanwhile v83 is being worked on. Also check out the Horizon Developer Blog if you're curious about Horizon audience segments and its support ecosystem.
- Thomas van Bouwel, the developer of Cubism, released Laser Dance. Game releases are typically not something I cover on this blog, but this one is a really good example of what mixed reality can be when you really lean into it, and Thomas had a very interesting 'making-of' interview with Gabriele Romagnoli which is worth checking out.
- XR Bootcamp posted several interesting videos on developing with Meta Quest as part of the programming around the Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition. Have a look at the playlist to see if it contains anything interesting for you, as several topics are covered.
- Daniel Oquelis released an interesting open source project called Quforia, getting Vuforia to run on Meta Quest.
- Karl Guttagg published a deep dive on the optical systems of Meta Ray-Ban Display.
- For my readers in The Netherlands, I had a chance to get my hands on a set of Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses for a week (thanks DARE Health Innovation!) and spoke about them in BNR's De Grote Tech Show podcast. Starts at minute 16 and runs for about 22 minutes. In Dutch unfortunately, so apologies to my English audience.
Snap
- Lens Studio v5.16 was released, as was a November update (reddit) full of small improvements and bug fixes for Snap OS on Spectacles.
- A bunch of videos on several topics around developing for Snap Spectacles were released, including an intro by Supabase, one on Connected Lenses and one on the AI & MCP tooling in Lens Studio.
- While working with Spectacles and location/compass data, I found myself needing some tooling around that, which I open sourced this month as SnapOSLocationTools. It combines a bunch of features (e.g. Map Component, UI Kit, Mobile Kit) to quickly show you exactly where Spectacles thinks it is and its compass orientation, plus it allows you to pull in location data from your iOS device through Mobile Kit. Hope it is useful!
siekermantechnology
Other
- Let's start with a big one: Niantic Spatial is shutting down 8th Wall. In what it's calling 'The Next Chapter', there isn't really a next chapter, as it'll become basically unusable in just over three months. In recent months they had been shifting focus from web AR to web gaming, but that clearly didn't get enough traction to keep things going. Unfortunate, because it was an impressive, although expensive, platform!
- In the post there is mention of potentially part of the 8th Wall technology being open sourced, but there is nothing concrete around that yet, so let's wait and see what happens there.
- As alternatives I suspect Zappar and Snap's Camera Kit Web will see some uptake.
Nov 20, 2025 . 1 min read . Announcements
- Unity held its Unite Conference in Barcelona and stunned the game engine world by having Epic/Unreal Engine's Tim Sweeney on stage to announce a partnership allowing Unity games to be shipped in Fortnite. Non-XR, but still fascinating, especially that they managed to keep this a secret and nothing leaked. Also good to see this kind of open approach on the side of Epic!
- During Unite, there was an XR segment during the live stream which started around 1 hour 44 minutes, lasting more than an hour, covering Android XR and Meta Quest. And the roadmap session contained a few small announcements in the XR area around Android XR and Meta Quest.
- Epic released (forum) Unreal Engine 5.7, so check it out!
- Godot keeps working on its OpenXR support, added support for Android XR and shared a general update on the XR work that is being done. And if you're deep in the weeds of OpenXR, check out this blog by the Khronos Group.
Godot Engine
- There still appears to be some life in MRTK, which just got an update.
- Even Magic Leap OS got a tiny update (the first in almost a year) to fix a security issue related to the recent Unity vulnerability. Still wouldn't get my hopes up of the Magic Leap headset being around for much longer, as they go ever further down the path of component supplier.
- Blender 5.0 was released.
- In a bit more Netherlands-specific news, we held our latest XR Creators Connect NL meetup (#7 already) at the end of October, and it was a blast, with in-house XR teams from ASML, KLM (the airline), NS (the railways), Police and the Ministry of Defence sharing what they're working on. We're working on future editions throughout 2026!
Upcoming XR events
- December 5-7, 2025 - SensAI Hack San Francisco.
- December 8-10, 2025 - United XR Europe in Brussels, Belgium. A new event resulting from a merger between AWE EU and Stereopsia.
- I'll be there! Check the intro of this month's newsletter for more details.
- December 9th, 2025 - Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition submission deadline.
- January 22-26, 2026 - Reality Hack at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- February 2-4, 2026 - AWE Asia in Singapore.
- April 8-10, 2026 - Laval Virtual in Laval, France.
- June 15-18, 2026 - AWE USA in Long Beach, California.
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.
