Enhanced Mac Support Accelerates Your Unity Workflow with Meta Quest

Our vision for a more open platform starts with a diverse ecosystem of developers. You bring your unique perspective and skill set together with others to create experiences for people to enjoy and enhance their lives. To make this a reality, we know it’s important that you can build with your preferred and familiar platforms and hardware.

That’s why we’re excited to share that we’ve expanded our Mac support to make development easier and faster using key Meta tools. Unity developers building on Mac can now achieve a more efficient workflow without needing to constantly jump between platforms—giving you more time to build incredible experiences. We want to give you the tools to succeed using platforms you’re familiar with and improve your journey from ideation to distribution and beyond.

Dive in below to learn how you can catalyze your development process using key tools on Mac.

Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) streamlines your daily workflow and should be one of the first things you download. MQDH provides a centralized view of headset settings, app performance metrics, available tools and more. With MQDH support for Mac, you have an efficient tool to set up your device for development, monitor performance, download additional packages, and upload your app for testing and publishing.

In recent months, we’ve expanded Mac support for Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) to include M-series chip support, which helps MQDH start up even faster and provides the same Performance Page functionality as Mac devices using an Intel chip.

To get started with MQDH and learn more about this essential tool, refer to these resources:

Testing is an invaluable part of the development process, ensuring quality, accessibility, and overall functionality. Now with Mac support for Meta XR Simulator, you can easily iterate and test your projects without needing to deploy your app to your headset every time. Meta XR Simulator is a lightweight, OpenXR runtime that streamlines the iteration and testing process by enabling you to simulate touch controller inputs and hand tracking, as well as a broad set of VR and MR features, using your Quest controllers, mouse and keyboard, or game controller.

By simulating inputs and leveraging the tool’s built-in synthetic environments, you can easily test your project’s mechanics, design, and user experience to save considerable time before conducting final in-headset testing. Developers using XR Simulator can also simplify testing setup and scale automation for both single-player and multiplayer apps by utilizing record and replay functionality, which allows you to build fast manual tests, automated tests that run in continuous automation, or play against yourself in a multiplayer test setup.

“Meta XR Simulator support for macOS is a huge deal for XR developers.” said Dilmer Valecillos, XR developer, content creator, and Founder of Learn XR. “I know many people who have asked for this for years, and it will not only save iteration time but also provide more options for developers who are used to using macOS for their development.” Check out Dilmer’s recent video about Meta XR Simulator for a great walkthrough of the tool.

Instructions for downloading Meta XR Simulator for Mac can be found on GitHub. To get started and learn more about Meta XR Simulator’s powerful features, visit the following resources:

Once you’ve built out your project, it’s critically important to ensure your project runs smoothly and delivers an optimal visual experience. Drops in rendering performance and quality due to inefficient resource utilization can hamper the user experience and lead to immersion-breaking hiccups, but through the strategic use of optimization tools, developers on both PC and Mac can now easily debug graphics and ensure consistent performance in their projects.

RenderDoc is an industry-leading graphics debugger that enables you to inspect your app’s draw calls on a per-frame basis to achieve a detailed look at performance. You can see the state of your framebuffer(s) between draws, inspect bound resources, view shaders, meshes, and much more to debug graphics output. Our Meta Fork extends RenderDoc to work with Quest devices and integrates Qualcomm's powerful GPU performance measurement tools so you can analyze per-draw performance metrics. With our latest update, you can now use RenderDoc with Meta Quest on Mac to optimize your apps.

RenderDoc is just one powerful tool in a growing suite of performance tools available to developers building on Mac for Meta Quest. Now you can also leverage a variety of tools to get a better understanding of app performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize GPU:

To get started with RenderDoc Meta Fork, please visit the following resources:

Haptics reinforce the immersive qualities of VR and MR by helping people stay engaged and present within their environment. Through synchronized audio and tactile feedback, your app’s users can feel the action, get assurance when they make inputs, and feel more immersed in your app experience.

Now you can leverage Meta Haptic Studio on Mac to easily design and audition high-quality haptic clips, then integrate them into your apps with Meta Haptics SDK. Meta Haptic Studio is a desktop app and companion VR app that enables you to load single or multiple audio files and automatically receive haptic analysis. From there, the tool allows you to audition your clips on your device within an authentic in-app environment, and export them for implementation. The haptics you create will be backward-compatible across Quest 3, Quest Pro, and Quest 2 to ensure your entire audience can benefit from a new level of immersion.

Haptic design is an exciting frontier of immersive app development, and we’ve worked to provide extensive educational materials to help you quickly get started and understand best practices. Using these materials, you can gain the necessary guidance to explore the potential of haptic experiences in your projects.

Expanded support for development on Mac delivers a suite of tools to help you build faster, optimize performance with greater ease, and drive innovation. We’re dedicated to expanding support for our tools to enable even more developers to build high-quality apps for Meta Quest. As we continue adding support for Mac and delivering tools that help you unlock your creativity, be sure to stay up to date with the latest news by following us on X and Facebook, and subscribing to our monthly newsletter from your settings in the Developer Dashboard.