When creating immersive apps, developers often juggle between different platforms, aiming to achieve consistent and high-quality experiences. We know that maintenance and testing are typically time-consuming processes, especially when targeting multiple platforms. That’s why we’ve been busy working on improving support for our development tools and features through the lens of big-picture developer success: Enabling more opportunities for you to grow your business and reach a wider audience on and off Meta Horizon OS—without sacrificing excessive time or managing separate codebases.
To that end, we’re excited to share two updates that bring unique capabilities to new audiences: Cross-platform support for
Haptics SDK and
Meta Haptics Studio, and
Interaction SDK (ISDK) support for the OpenXR hand skeleton.
Dive in below to learn how you can leverage these capabilities on Meta Quest devices, PCVR, and beyond, plus get insights on how they enabled developers behind top apps on the Meta Horizon Store.
Design Once, Play Anywhere: Cross-Platform Haptics Integration with Meta Haptics SDK
Haptics SDK (
Unity |
Unreal) enables you to heighten feelings of presence and stimulate users’ sense of touch by providing a high-level, media-based API for playing haptic clips created with
Meta Haptics Studio. This package detects the controller type at runtime and optimizes the haptic rendering to maximize the controller’s capabilities to provide haptic feedback.
Overview of the haptics optimization process.
While our haptics tools have already helped numerous developers elevate user experiences for Meta Horizon OS, Meta Haptics Studio and the recently released update to the Meta Haptics SDK (v69) now offer a game-changing solution for cross-platform haptics support: Haptics designed with Meta Haptic Studio are now reusable on Quest, PCVR, iOS, and other VR platforms, allowing you to export haptic files in formats like .haptic, .ahap, and .wav. This flexibility allows for a more seamless integration across various platforms by eliminating the need to redesign assets.
Haptic assets can now be exported in a variety of formats.
Developers have long expressed the need for a unified method of managing app integrations across PCVR and Meta Quest platforms. While cross-platform support for haptics doesn’t solve every integration challenge, the benefits of this solution can be felt in the top VR titles that already integrated this capability, like
POPULATION: ONE (BigBox VR) and
Max Mustard (Toast Interactive).
“Maintaining separate codebases was a significant hurdle”, shared a developer from the BigBox VR team. With cross-platform support for haptics, developers at BigBox VR were able to simplify this process and free up more time to focus on enhancing user experiences without the burden of duplicate work.
Enhancing POPULATION: ONE and Max Mustard
For POPULATION: ONE, Meta Haptics Studio played a key role in redesigning weapons and other interactions with advanced haptics. Now, players experience more immersive gameplay, elevating the overall experience as they feel refined tactile feedback that places them squarely in the action of combat.
For the BigBox VR team, the integration of cross-platform support was transformative. Meta Haptics SDK made the process easier by reducing the amount of branching code and keeping the integration points common across all target platforms. “The ease of integration and reduced maintenance allowed us to focus on creativity,” said a team member.
With more time and energy available for creative pursuits, the team delivered a superior experience that keeps users on the edge of their seats.“We can author our haptics once and know that they will be faithfully recreated on the other VR headsets we support. In the past, we had to do loads of work to get these to feel right and with Meta Haptics Studio and SDK, it just works.” a developer of Population: One shared.
For Toast Interactive, the team behind the adventure game Max Mustard, Meta Haptics Studio and Haptics SDK enabled them to immediately leverage their curated haptic clips for both PC and extend their audience to console VR experiences.
“Many of the Max Mustard reviews mention the quality of the haptics. Luckily for us, haptics was a ‘do it once, do it right’ situation when using the Haptics Studio”, shared Richard Eastes from Toast Interactive.
No matter what kind of game or experience you are building, leveraging a single integration point for various platforms makes adding advanced haptics not only easy for Quest devices, but also for other PCVR devices using OpenXR standards, including apps targeting SteamVR.
These sentiments are just a fraction of the benefits we hope to provide for your business, and we can’t wait to hear how cross-platform haptics help support your goals and create opportunities to amplify immersion, presence, and delight for your users. To get started, visit the documentation for
Meta Haptics Studio and Meta Haptics SDK (
Unity |
Unreal).
Try POPULATION: ONE Haptics
Download Haptics Studio and feel the haptics designed for POPULATION: ONE in our new example project. This project enables you to take a look behind the scenes and get a feel for the uniquely crafted weapon designs helping players feel more immersed in the action.
Meta Haptics Studio offers sample packs from popular apps that can help you understand how haptic assets are created.
Introducing the ISDK OpenXR Hand Skeleton
Starting with v71, ISDK and Core SDK have added support for the OpenXR hand skeleton. Historically, the hand skeleton provided in the Core SDK is a proprietary format that we are referring to as the OVR Hand Skeleton. This OVR skeleton predates the OpenXR hand skeleton standard, and thus differs from the OpenXR standard in a number of joints, location of joints, and joint orientation.
Now with v71, ISDK has added end-to-end support for the OpenXR hand skeleton. This means the OpenXR skeleton format is used all the way from the data source (input) through to the hand visuals (output).
This change improves compatibility with packages, assets, and scripts that conform to the OpenXR industry standard, and enhances cross-platform support by following the hand skeleton format provided by Unity’s XR Hands package. In simple terms, you can save time and create consistency between user experiences by leveraging ISDK’s suite of high-quality, intuitive interactions on several platforms.
OVR Hand Skeleton (top) and OpenXR Hand Skeleton (bottom) comparison.
While we previously launched support for Unity XR and XR Hands in v67, ISDK still relied on the OVR skeleton internally. Skeletal data from Unity’s XR Hands was simply converted from the OpenXR to the OVR format at the ISDK data source layer. Because of the issues inherent in having and supporting two skeletal formats simultaneously in a project, our long-term goal was always to fully transition ISDK to the OpenXR standard. To get started with Interaction SDK, visit the
documentation and download
Core SDK.
We’re thrilled to be able to support more opportunities for you to delight audiences on Meta Horizon OS and across the VR landscape. By leveraging our unique interaction and haptic capabilities on multiple platforms, you can ensure your audience gets the same high-quality experience regardless of their device type—and with the ability to reuse your code for multiple platforms, you can focus more of your energy on designing and building out your unique vision versus developing platform-specific integrations.
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