From Mobile to Mixed Reality: A Guide to Meta Spatial SDK for Android Developers

At Connect last year, we opened our platform to Android developers and launched Meta Spatial SDK, a new toolkit enabling mobile developers to easily build spatial experiences for Meta Horizon OS. Since launch, Spatial SDK has empowered a new cohort of developers to quickly build a broad range of new experiences, from traditional use cases like media, education, training and productivity to new verticals like robotics and AI.

Since launching, we have been working hard to improve Spatial SDK based on developer feedback from our community. Today, we’ll dive into the latest improvements that make the toolkit bigger, better and faster for both new and existing developers alike. Learn about all the updates and discover best practices to power development with Spatial SDK below.

The feedback we’ve received from developers makes one thing clear: You want to do more with Spatial SDK and build new kinds of experiences for Quest users. From leveraging new capabilities to enabling seamless interactions and transitions, you can now unlock more with Spatial SDK:

Passthrough camera access is one of the most requested features because it enables mobile AR developers to build similar types of experiences for Quest devices. Now, you can leverage passthrough camera access via Android’s Camera2 API to build next-generation mixed reality apps that enhance scene understanding and detect physical objects using custom ML/CV libraries. Check out our documentation on the Passthrough Camera API to quickly get started.

To get inspired, check out our latest showcase, Spatial Scanner, to see what’s possible when you implement Passthrough camera access. Spatial Scanner enables you to scan your environment, identify items in your home and access more information about them.

Some examples include scanning your kitchen to learn how to properly maintain your new fridge, scanning your living room to learn how to troubleshoot connectivity issues on your TV, or scanning your new smartphone to understand more about its features and settings. There are just some of the many possibilities to explore with Passthrough camera access and Spatial Scanner, and you can visit the documentation to learn more.

Seamless interactions are critical for delivering a great user experience in XR, and now with ISDK support, all developers building with Spatial SDK can integrate intuitive interactions that make their experience more engaging. With ISDK, you can easily support standardized panel interactions, more natural hand interactions and interactions with near field panels. Check out our beta release of ISDK to start enabling seamless interactions in your spatial app today.

Media is one of the most popular use cases for Spatial SDK. From streaming linear content on boundless screens and viewing spatial photos to providing the best 3D movie experience around, media shines on Quest devices. And now, you can explore our Premium Media Sample to find best practices for achieving quality media playback using Spatial SDK. The sample is open source and available on Github, making it easy to modify and valuable as a learning resource as you build your next great media experience for Horizon. We’ve also published a dedicated Media page in our docs for additional guidance on this use case.

Hybrid capabilities enable developers with existing mobile apps to retain their mobile experience on Quest as a panel while also delivering a differentiated immersive experience that leverages the native capabilities of the Horizon platform. This duality gives users the freedom and flexibility to engage with your content in the mode that works best for them. Media and entertainment apps are perfect examples of optimized hybrid experiences where users can choose to watch content while multi-tasking with other apps, or fully immerse themselves in a custom, bespoke environment. Check out our updated documentation and sample on building hybrid apps to get started.

To help developers building with Spatial SDK overcome common development challenges and build better apps, we’ve shipped some big performance improvements and added support for the Horizon OS UI Set. These upgrades enable you to build Spatial SDK apps that look and perform like system apps, offering a better overall experience for your audience.

The UI Set streamlines development of common interface patterns to deliver a seamless user experience across immersive apps. Both designers and developers can leverage it to focus more of their time on creating engaging content while leaving the heavy lifting of supporting consistent input modalities and visual feedback to the UI Set.

The UI Set provides foundational components like buttons, sliders, toggles and dropdowns, along with templates for common content navigation patterns. It's also customizable, enabling you to easily apply your brand's color palette and identity while maintaining high-quality interactions and visuals. Check out our documentation and showcase to quickly get started.

In addition to Horizon OS UI Set for Spatial SDK, we have also added Spatial SDK design guidelines to our documentation. These guidelines provide best practices and advice on how to design for spatial immersive experiences on Horizon OS. We will continue to update these docs, so don’t forget to bookmark them for quick reference.

One of the biggest recent wins is the significant performance boost to our ECS (Entity-component-system) runtime. By reducing the time spent per frame tick while running systems, apps can now hit smooth 90 fps more consistently—even with complex scenes. Faster ECS queries and new support for advanced filtering means you can write smarter, more efficient logic without sacrificing performance. Whether you’re building densely interactive environments or running high-frequency updates across many entities, these improvements make it easier than ever to build rich, immersive MR experiences for Horizon OS.

One of the primary advantages of the Spatial SDK toolkit is the ability to build experiences quickly, and we’ve doubled down on this benefit by continuing to invest in tools that enable you to develop even faster and improve your daily workflows.

The new Android Studio Plugin (ASP) significantly improves the development experience with Spatial SDK by providing project templates, a data model inspector and component/system file templates. For new projects, getting set up is as easy as downloading and installing the plugin and clicking on our template. As you build out your project, use the data model inspector to quickly analyze your scene to find bottlenecks and other issues. Check out our samples and documentation to get started.

Spatial Editor 2.0 is a spatial composition tool that helps you import, organize and transform your assets into visual compositions to create immersive experiences on Horizon OS. The latest update introduces a new component system that lets you define and manage components with XML for enhanced flexibility. This update also allows you to generate Kotlin Component code based on XML input. Take a look at the overview page and download Spatial Editor to start building your Meta Horizon experiences.

Since its initial launch, we’ve been inspired by the engaging and high-quality experiences the developer community is building with Spatial SDK, and we hope these latest improvements will help you build bigger, better and faster. With new tools, samples and performance upgrades, we’re excited to see more mobile developers innovate and build the next breakout hits for Horizon. To explore and share insights with like-minded developers, don’t forget to reach out on the Spatial SDK community forums and follow us on X and Facebook for the latest updates.