Connect 2021 Developer State of the Union: Developing for the Metaverse

Connect 2021 kicked off today in a virtual format that showcased the latest in AR/VR developments, new developer tools, and much more. The keynote took a look into the future and the metaverse—a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you couldn’t do in the physical world with other people, regardless of where they happen to be.

After exploring the possibilities ahead, Chris Pruett, Tom Langan, Allison Lee, and Mari Kyle dove into the past, present, and future of VR and gave an overview of the communities, programs, and tools that will pave the way for new advances in both the short- and long-term.

Watch the full Developer State of the Union to hear about how we’re providing better ways to get things done, adding new capabilities to the Quest Platform, and expanding the Oculus Ecosystem.

Below you’ll find a recap of some highlights from the talk, including announcements—like Presence Platform and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)—and major updates to avatars, Oculus Developer Hub (ODH), and more. The possibilities for the future of VR are exciting, and we’re looking forward to seeing your ideas come to life with the help of these new tools.

Over the past year, we’ve improved RenderDoc for Oculus, with new features like Vulkan Validation Layers and Heatmaps and access to more GPU performance data across all our performance tools. We added support for Perfetto, which can be accessed in one click via ODH. A major update to ODH is now available—ODH 2.0—with even more features for device management, package management, news, and more.

For apps that are more resilient to latency and want to maximize time per frame, we’re introducing Application SpaceWarp—a major leap in compute power that allows apps to run at half frame rate.

Check out the following Connect sessions that dive deeper into these features:

During the keynote, we announced Presence Platform, a suite of machine perception and AI capabilities—including Insight SDK (Passthrough, Spatial Anchors, Scene), Interaction SDK, and Voice SDK—that enable you to build mixed-reality experiences and natural interactions on Oculus Quest devices.

We recently launched the first in a suite of new multiplayer features, including Destinations, Group Presence, Roster, Invite to App, and Invite Link, to make it easier for people to get together, stay together, and have fun in VR. Today we introduced two more features coming soon—Quick Invite API and Ask to Join—that will let players send invites without leaving the game and make it easy to join a friend’s game directly from the Quest UI. And for players who haven’t fully built out their friend list, we’re building new systems that will help them discover and friend other players based on the friends they recently played with. These features introduce more people to your app and enhance social interaction, creating a unique multiplayer experience where players feel physically present with their friends in-app.

A new Cloud Backup system is also launching later this year. It works at the filesystem level, with no coding required. Apps are opted-in by default, and you’ll be able to make adjustments to this on our developer site.

Earlier this year we began rolling out our new Avatars. We’re excited to announce that our new more expressive, more customizable, and more diverse Avatars SDK will launch for Unity in December. The new Avatars are powered by modular, native libraries built for maximum portability.

Learn more about these new capabilities in these Connect sessions⁠:

Oculus Quest 2 is growing quickly, and our ecosystem for VR apps and games is larger than it has ever been. Our strategy of focusing on quality is driving revenue to developers and growing their businesses. We will continue to focus on making developers successful, but at the same time we hope to expand our app ecosystem and developer platform, with new use cases, technologies, and developer communities. We’re working with partners building productivity, design, and collaboration apps, and adapting the Store to accommodate more categories. This year we also launched App Lab, and we’ve been inspired by the pace of experimentation we’re seeing.

As we evolve Horizon Home to be a platform where people can multitask to be entertained, productive, and social, we’re opening it up to third-party developers. As a first step, we’ll be supporting Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) that let your web app have the look and feel of a native app and gain access to better discovery and distribution features through the Oculus Store and App Lab. You can get the tools to build, sideload, and test PWAs on Quest today. We’ll share more soon about when you’ll be able to submit PWAs to App Lab. PWAs will also support WebXR for immersive and hybrid 2D+3D experiences—you can check out the talk dedicated to WebXR to learn more and hear ways we’re helping increase discoverability and capabilities of these experiences.

To find out more about these exciting updates, check out these Connect sessions:

If you’d like to catch up on the rest of the Connect news, check out our full recap of the event. Visit the Facebook Reality Labs Facebook page⁠ to watch the Developer State of the Union, Connect with Carmack, and all of the Connect Developer Sessions.