December Oculus Developer Recap

We closed out 2021 with another month full of exciting updates and announcements, including Meta Avatars SDK, ODH 2.1, and the availability of Spatial Anchors Experimental and Voice SDK. In case you missed one of the highlights, take a look back at our developer blog posts from December.

Oculus Launch Pad Grad Charuvit Wannissorn Shares the Creative Process Behind ‘Luna: Episode 1 - Left Behind’
2019 Launch Pad grant recipient Charuvit Wannissorn spoke with us about his involvement with Oculus Launch Pad and how it helped shape his career and the development of Luna: Episode 1 - Left Behind, a 25-30 minute interactive VR story about an android and a little girl trying to survive an AI apocalypse - now available on App Lab.

Oculus Developer Hub (ODH) 2.1
Following up on our 2.0 release at Connect this year, we’ve made several improvements to the Oculus Developer Hub (ODH) to optimize how you work with your devices and accommodate broader developer audiences. Here are the main highlights for Update 2.1.

Quest ‘Hand Gameplay Showcase’
We released a new sample project for Unreal Engine: The Quest Hand Gameplay Showcase. This project contains reusable components based on the more robust hand tracking mechanics from First Steps with Hand Tracking and Tiny Castles. We invite you to try these mechanics on your Quest, explore the source code of the project, and integrate the mechanics into your own project.

Avoiding Hitches When Loading Scenes in Unity
In order to ship an application on the Quest Store, the app needs to maintain a solid 72 frames per second. Games are getting bigger, and it’s becoming harder to keep everything in memory at once. There needs to be a way to load some parts of the game and unload others without the player noticing. The solution is streaming, which—in Unity—is usually achieved using asynchronous scene loading. This blog shares tips on how to avoid problems and make those scene transitions seamless.

AppSW Enhancements with DirectProjection and Compositor Layer SpaceWarp
We recently announced Application SpaceWarp (AppSW) at Connect 2021, a developer driven optimization that can give suitable apps up to 70 percent additional compute. This blog shares AppSW enhancements with DirectProjection and Compositor Layer SpaceWarp.

Meta Avatars SDK Now Available
The Meta Avatars SDK adds social presence to your experience with highly expressive and customizable avatars and more than a quintillion (no, we’re not making that up!) possible combinations of outfits and physical features.

Oculus Developer Release Notes: v35
This blog shares our latest release notes for v35.

Presence Platform Spatial Anchors Experimental and Voice SDK Now Available
We’re excited to announce the experimental release of Spatial Anchors, part of the Insight SDK within Presence Platform, and the general availability of Voice SDK which means you can start shipping voice-enabled experiences to your users.

If you have any questions or if there are other topics that you’d like us to cover in the blog, please let us know in the Developer Forum⁠.