XR Developer News - September 2025
While putting together this month's edition, I was looking through my Meta Connect coverage from last year. Connect was definitely interesting with the Display glasses being announced, but on the XR developer side it felt a bit slow to be honest.
Yes, there's the Display glasses and intriguing wristband, but those don't offer an SDK for now. Yes, there's the SDK for the non-display Meta Ray-Bans, but that's more external camera and bluetooth headset capabilities for mobile apps, not XR. Yes, on the Quest side there was Hyperscape, but not as a developer tool. When you look specifically at the developer tooling and capabilities, it was mostly (admittedly useful and welcome) iterative improvements, compared to last year's bigger announcements.
I suppose it's a result of Meta rolling out new developer features throughout the year, in contrast with Apple doing most of it in a big bang at WWDC. And clearly Meta wanted the story to be very focused on the display glasses this year. But still it felt a bit muted for developers.
The display glasses seem promising though. We're still a ways away from being able to build experiences for them, but they are undeniably a big step in the right direction. It feels like we're finally getting close to XR glasses becoming a real thing over the next few years.
Oh, and of course, while Meta had its big yearly party, the rest of the industry didn't sit still either, so there's plenty to talk about!
Meta
If you're a reader of this blog, I'm guessing you've watched the Meta Connect keynote already, and probably the developer keynote as well. If you're looking for general overviews of Connect, check out the coverage by UploadVR, Antony Vitillo and The Verge.
The best overview of everything new for developers was this blog post by Meta on their Horizon developer blog. It's worth reading through in detail, even if it takes a while and part of it is repeating previous announcements. The MCP server sounds interesting for improving AI-supported development workflows, the new building blocks seem useful, it's nice to see the steady improvements to the Passthrough Camera API and it's always good to see the open immersive web get some love.
I'm not really sold yet on the Spatial SDK for adding spatial capabilities to existing 2D Android apps as being a much-adopted way of working, but it seems like an interesting avenue for media streaming apps to come to the platform. That in general is a use case Meta has been hinting strongly at as a major focus for the next iteration of Quest headsets, which is rumoured to be more like Bigscreen Beyond but with a compute puck, for significantly increased comfort. And clearly Meta is continuing to work on making its Spatial SDK and tooling as solid as it can be.
The big developer announcement was the Wearables Device Access Toolkit, opening up the camera, microphone and speaker of existing iterations of Meta's Ray-Ban glasses to mobile app developers. Not really XR, but it feels like a precursor of things to come for the Display glasses, so interesting to check out nonetheless.
Meta published a YouTube playlist with all the session videos, although I found most of them to be very entry-level. The blog post mentioned earlier went much more into detail. Best to have a look at the playlist yourself to see if anything is covered there which catches your interest.
There was one final bit of news before Connect, with QR code tracking capabilities being added to the Quest SDKs. Oh, and check out the excellent interview with Robert Coviello by Gabriele Romagnoli.
Snap
- Snap announced Snap OS 2.0 for Spectacles, which seems focused mostly on evolving the main OS interface and apps, getting them closer to ready for consumer use on the Specs that are coming in 2026.
- Lens Studio v5.13 and v5.14 were released.
- Snap engineer Alessio Granchi released several more interesting Lens Studio / Spectacles videos on Typescript, game controller support and the Auth API.
- Snap sent around an email indicating that they're changing the Lens Fund to not really work based on submissions through their web form anymore, instead looking at the Spectacles reddit, the community challenges, and projects that are doing well in user numbers for identifying where they might fund initiatives. I'm not sure why the web form is still up though.
Other XR hardware, software and news
Even with Meta Connect going on, there was plenty of other XR developer news:
- Apple released visionOS 26, which I covered in depth in June. Maybe it's even more impressive to see the areas in which Apple is ahead of Meta, now that Meta Connect didn't feature anything about Codec Avatars and Augments.
David Heaney
- Unity shared an overview of the recent XR-related things it has shipped in and around Unity 6.2.
- Godot shared an update on everything XR in its game engine.
Godot Engine
- Niantic's 8th Wall made several announcements around native app export, physics and its desktop app, but with each month it feels like it's moving more and more away from XR and into web gaming.
- Snap's Oscar Falmer made an interesting overview of current SDKs for all sorts of Smart Glasses. Great effort!
- In a similar direction, David Heaney at UploadVR wrote an article showing the same thing, that many different types of smart glasses are in the works at the moment by many companies. Solid overview.
David Heaney
- Khronos Group shared the presentations it gave at SIGGRAPH, including one about the latest updates to OpenXR, which covers Spatial Entities and multi-app support.
Upcoming XR events
- October 16, 2025 - Snap Lens Fest
- October 30, 2025 - The next edition of XR Creators Connect NL, the XR meetup in The Netherlands which I co-organize.
- November 19-20, 2025 - Unity's Unite 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.
- December 8-10, 2025 - United XR Europe in Brussels, Belgium. A new event resulting from a merger between AWE EU and Stereopsia.
- I'm hosting a panel at United XR with Gabriele Romagnoli, Antony Vitillo and Casandra Vuong. Details to follow, but should definitely be a good one!
- 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.
