Sep 18, 2025

Meta Connect 2025: Fueling the Future of VR

At Meta Connect, we’re sharing the latest breakthroughs, tools, and programs designed to help you craft experiences people want to spend time in and ways to grow thriving communities around them. From today’s VR headsets to tomorrow’s AR glasses, AI is a major unlock that will bring the next computing platform into much sharper focus.

As our audience grows and evolves, we’re seeing new use cases emerge, leading to more opportunities for VR developers to find success. In fact, over 300 apps on the Meta Horizon Store have now generated more than $1 million in revenue, and 10 apps have generated over $50 million.

We’re breaking down the biggest announcements for Horizon OS below. Here’s what you can expect:

A preview of upcoming AI tools for VR developers

Several new monetization and engagement features

Major updates for Building Blocks, Meta XR Simulator, and our Passthrough Camera API

Key improvements for Android developers running Android apps on Meta Horizon OS and turning them into VR experiences with Meta Spatial SDK

Our brand-new Immersive Web SDK

New features to share your input with Meta

Whether you’re building solo, with a small squad, or at scale in a studio, developing for Horizon OS is about to get a major upgrade. Dive in below to learn more.

Accelerate Your Workflows with AI

The MCP will make it easy to bring Horizon OS context into the LLMs and coding assistants you already use. By linking AI to our suite of development tools, you can achieve streamlined workflows, faster optimizations, and accelerate overall development. Some early use cases include:

Horizon OS Knowledge Base: Ask questions about Horizon OS development and get accurate responses to support troubleshooting and elevate your understanding of VR development.

Code Generation: Enter prompts and generate code for projects built in Unity or Android, whether you’re porting 2D apps to our platform or building new experiences with Meta Spatial SDK.

AI-Driven Performance Optimization: Use LLMs to analyze perf traces, identify performance issues, and get recommendations for optimizing your project’s performance.

In-Headset AI Development: Using the Immersive Debugger, you can edit, modify, and improve your apps in real time while in-headset via voice inputs.

End-to-End Prototyping: Jumpstart development by using text prompts to build a functional prototype in Unity or Spatial SDK.

As we look ahead, we’re going to keep pushing more knowledge and capabilities into these AI tools to support every developer, and we're excited to be working with Unity on an MCP solution that will be available soon.

Six Ways Meta Horizon Makes It Easier to Earn and Engage

1. Season Passes Unlock Upfront Revenue

The new Season Pass feature lets eligible developers bundle IAPs into one purchase, giving players a set of items upfront and automatically delivering new ones as the season progresses. It’s especially useful for free-to-play apps and titles with frequent content drops, keeping people who might skip individual purchases engaged with fresh rewards. You can create Season Passes directly in the Bundles page of the Developer Dashboard.

2. Featured Bundles Can Create Instant Value

Featured bundles let you combine your base app with one or more IAPs and create tiered offerings, like Standard, Deluxe, and Collector’s Edition, for example. With multiple tiers to choose from, this feature delivers a great way to differentiate your app and IAPs for your app’s biggest fans who are looking for more content from your experience. You can start creating featured bundles now in the Bundles page of the Developer Dashboard.

3. New Re-Engagement Tools Help You Boost Conversion Rates

Next month, we’re piloting a re-engagement tool that lets you send promo codes to wishlisters. By reaching people who’ve already shown interest, you can turn intent into purchases and improve conversion rates. We’ll start with wishlists and expand to more audience cohorts over time.

4. Meta Credits Reduce Checkout Friction

We’ve seen Meta Credits reduce purchase friction and drive higher purchase rates in worlds and the Avatar Store, and they now work for app and IAP purchases. Meta Credits give players more flexibility and a streamlined checkout option without the need to enter card information. Visit the Meta Credits page in the Developer Dashboard to join the Open Beta program.

5. Meta Horizon+ Boosts Discovery and Generates Recurring Revenue

Meta Horizon+ is our premium subscription service, giving players access to a curated library of VR titles. Over the past year, 67 apps that participated in Meta Horizon+ earned more than $20 million from the program. As an example, Synth Riders was added to the Meta Horizon+ rotating games catalog a year ago and has seen over 60% growth in revenue since. Developers can now apply directly through the Developer Dashboard, and eligible apps will get featured in the Horizon+ catalog. Being featured in the catalog can help more people discover your content and contribute to repeat engagement as subscribers seek to get the most value from their Horizon+ subscription.

6. New Tools for Community Connection

Organization Profiles are now your hub for apps, posts, events, and links you want to share with your audience, along with new featured shelves across the Meta Horizon Store that include these profiles for added visibility. Developer Posts are also evolving, with support for comments coming soon to make it easier to connect with your community and gather feedback.

Three Tool Updates to Build, Experiment, and Test Efficiently

1. Building Blocks

Each year, we’ve added new features to make it easier to build for fresh use cases and in-app functionality. But we also know early integration can be a headache, which is why we built Meta Building Blocks, a Unity tool as part of the Meta SDK that lets you drop in features like passthrough or set up multiplayer capabilities with just a few clicks.

Now we’re taking things further with four new building blocks coming in v83 to help you quickly add functionality and experiment, including two AI blocks that make smarter, more responsive experiences:

Passthrough Camera Access: The foundational building block that enables you to access a single front-facing camera to capture an image or video.

Passthrough Camera Feed Visualizer: View the left and right cameras’ textures for binocular views.

Object Detection: This block takes the images from the passthrough camera and feeds them to an object detection algorithm, enabling you to identify common objects in the room. This can form the basis of reacting in real time to objects or changes in the environment.

LLM: Connect to the LLM of your choice and bring all the power of large language models to interpret and interact with your environment.

2. Passthrough Camera API

Speaking of Passthrough Camera Access, if you missed the launch of the Passthrough Camera API (PCA) earlier this year, this new tool gives you access to Meta Quest’s front-facing cameras so you can build for machine learning and computer vision use cases.

In just six months, we’ve seen dozens of published apps and hundreds of developers building with the capability to dynamically apply textures from room images, feed AI models, help with navigation, and calculate data about your player’s physical environment like brightness and ambience.

In one real-world utility use case, CGS Immersive leverages the Passthrough Camera API to expedite server analysis and troubleshooting.

In addition to making PCA easier to integrate with Building Blocks, we’ve also made a few key enhancements, with more to come this year:

Improved visual quality in v78

Reduced latency and dual camera support for Unity in v81

Increasing camera resolution to 1280x1280, or 1.6 megapixels (coming soon)

These upgrades will help make apps leveraging the camera feed feel more seamless by enabling crisper images and experiences that feel synchronous, consistent, and connected with the physical world. As new capabilities like PCA open the door for increasingly complex and adaptive use cases, testing only becomes more critical for ensuring a great user experience (more on that next).

3. Meta XR Simulator

Featuring a redesigned interface and streamlined workflows, we’ve bolstered the Meta XR Simulator, our essential lightweight XR runtime for Windows and Mac that helps you easily debug and test your projects in simulated environments without ever putting on a headset. These updates aim to make the revamped XR Simulator more intuitive and easier to navigate so you can troubleshoot and prototype projects faster in Unity, Unreal, and Godot.

A redesigned interface makes XR Simulator more intuitive and easier to navigate.

With tools that support you from prototyping through testing, we’re helping you turn inspiration into the future of connection. Now, learn about the latest ways we’re helping you expand your reach, attract audiences, and grow vibrant communities.

Seven Ways We’ve Improved Android 2D and Spatial SDK Development for Meta Quest Since Last Connect

Last year, we opened the Horizon OS platform to mobile app developers by providing a path for 2D mobile apps to ship on Meta Quest. We also introduced Spatial SDK, our native app framework that enables Android developers to spatialize existing mobile apps—or create entirely new VR experiences for Quest by leveraging familiar development languages, tools, and libraries.

Since then, we’ve made a ton of updates to make your Android development experience better and enable you to easily enhance your app with VR capabilities like Passthrough Camera Access. Here are the top highlights:

Tooling

Android Studio Plugin: Makes project setup simple and substantially cut down compatibility work with automated checks and coding support.

Spatial Editor 2.0: Improved desktop scene composer with hot asset reloading.

One-Click Testing and Spatial Simulator (Coming Soon): Plug in and play, or iterate on your desktop without deploying to Meta Quest headsets.

New Immersive Features

Premium Media Sample and Meta Video Extensions (Coming Soon): Enable high-quality media experiences by starting with our open source Premium Media sample. Plus, you can build peak-quality immersive media with our exoplayer plugin.

Immersive Media, Dolby Atmos and Gsplats (Coming Soon): Deliver immersive media experiences that can only be experienced on Quest with immersive media formats like 3D and 360-degree, along with premium Dolby Atmos audio. Soon, you’ll also be able to add hyper-realistic 3D environments with our upcoming GSplat support.

Passthrough Camera Access (PCA) : Build apps that were not possible before PCA and blend the physical and virtual worlds seamlessly. Use custom computer vision models to understand the world and digitally build on top of it. Check out Spatial Scanner, our open source showcase, to get started.

Workflow and AI

Horizon OS MCP (Coming Soon): Enhance your existing AI workflows with our Horizon OS MCP. Add Horizon OS specific context to your LLM for accurate responses, codegen, performance optimization, and more. Unlock the power of your AI workflow for Horizon OS development.

Visit our dedicated documentation sites for Android and Spatial SDK today to get started with building for Horizon OS and experience all these new benefits.

One Powerful Tool to Streamline Immersive Web Development

We’ve covered 3D and 2D panel development, but immersive web experiences are quickly becoming the next big frontier thanks to their wide accessibility and reach. Our new Immersive Web SDK makes building for web faster and easier, with a scalable foundation built on Three.js and a high-performance entity component system. Here are the highlights:

Save Significant Development Time: Access an automated workflow designed for web developers along with out-of-the-box, pre-built systems for grabbing, locomotion, spatial audio, physics (Havok), and Scene understanding.

Develop Without a Meta Quest Headset: The emulation runtime automatically activates on localhost so you can test on desktop or in VR with the same code.

We’re also solving one of immersive web experiences’ toughest challenges: UI. Since HTML isn’t available, we used UIKit, a GPU-accelerated UI system that feels native to 3D. It supports shaders, physics-based materials, Flexbox layouts, and interactivity like hovering and scrolling, and it works seamlessly across WebXR and flat screens for reusable, cross-device interfaces.

The UIKit enables you to seamlessly customize UI components across web-based immersive experiences.

Get started with the Immersive Web SDK by visiting the documentation.

From new AI features to tools like the Immersive Web SDK, our work is shaped by your feedback. We aim to build tools that perform well, streamline your workflow, and help you overcome obstacles. That’s why we’re introducing new ways to share input and track issues, which we’ll cover below.

A New Place to Amplify Your Voice and Feedback

Sharing feedback shouldn’t be complicated. Feedback Center is coming soon, giving you a transparent, streamlined way to share input, track progress, and vote on what matters most. Here’s how:

Easy Submission: Send detailed feedback from the new tab in Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) or via the new Feedback Center portal.

Built-In Context: Logs and screenshots attach automatically to help us investigate issues faster.

Stay Updated: Track statuses like Received, Investigating, More Info Needed, Fix In Progress, Fix Complete, Backlogged, or Wishlist, and get email notifications on any changes.

To make your feedback even more impactful and transparent, we’re rolling out the Public Voting Board, a public tool that summarizes groupings of similar bug reports and feature requests. Here’s how it works:

Vote on investigations to influence priorities.

Track grouped reports and see how many others flagged the same issue.

Share, search, and filter investigations across categories.

Use AI-generated summaries (with human review) to get up to speed and flag inaccuracies.

A preview of the Feedback Center showing upvoted issues and their status.

Both the Feedback Center and Public Voting Board are coming soon to give you faster, clearer ways to see where your feedback fits and help shape what gets built next.

Catch More Details with Connect Sessions On-Demand

With more ways to build, more capabilities to experiment with, and more tools to bring your ideas to life, Horizon OS opens up more possibilities for development than ever before.

We covered a lot today, so if you want to go deeper, be sure to check out our digital Connect developer sessions coming soon to our YouTube playlist and the Connect session library. We can’t wait to see what you do with these upgrades, from building experiences that ignite the magical feeling of VR to monetization mechanisms that help you grow your business and everything in between.

For the latest developer news, subscribe to our monthly newsletter in your Developer Dashboard settings, check out the latest release notes, and follow us on X and Facebook. If you have feedback about any of our tools and features, be sure to let us know via the Feedback Tool in Meta Quest Developer Hub.

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