How Developers Are Increasing User Retention with Presence Platform’s Mixed Reality Tools

With Meta Quest 3 coming later this year, the next generation of VR and mixed reality (MR) is at your doorstep. Designed with best-in-class technology that lets you blend the physical world with virtual content, Quest 3 will enable you to deliver experiences that go beyond what’s possible with today’s MR.

You can start building for Quest 3 today with the help of Presence Platform, our suite of machine learning and AI-based capabilities that enable you to take your MR experiences to the next level. Here’s a quick overview of four key capabilities that can help you seamlessly blend the physical world environment with virtual objects in-headset. When coupled with broader Presence Platform capabilities like Hand Tracking and Body Tracking, the possibilities are endless.

We recently spoke to the developers behind the apps Cubism and TRIPP to learn about their experience integrating MR and how it’s made a positive impact on their business.

Thomas Van Bouwel’s Cubism encapsulates the genius of classic puzzle games, as players find themselves assembling increasingly complex shapes out of colorful blocks. Starting as a side project to harness the latest tech available for developers, Cubism has grown into a fan-favorite on the Meta Quest Store, thanks to capabilities like Passthrough and Hand Tracking. These capabilities translate into flexible features that give players more freedom to choose where and how they solve the game's puzzles.

We caught up with Van Bouwel to hear more about the MR features that were added to Cubism, and to learn about the associated business benefits of integrating these tools.

“Meta Quest's Presence Platform, especially Hand Tracking and Passthrough, has been a great fit for Cubism's simple game format,” Van Bouwel says. “I'm drawn to MR because it seems to reduce the onboarding friction for new players since it lets them stay connected to their environment.”

For Cubism, Presence Platform capabilities were also a critical component of creating a meaningful experience in-headset for the user.

“Passthrough seems to be especially compelling when combined with Hand Tracking, since the Hand Tracking API lets you sync virtual hands with your real hands,” notes Van Bouwel. “Using your own hands really helps make the experience more compelling. Beyond this, we're also looking into Spatial Anchor support to let the puzzle's position persist between play sessions."

Overall, Cubism has found success in terms of user adoption and retention.

“Cubism has found an audience on the Meta Quest platform,” according to Van Bouwel. “This was partially driven by peoples’ interest to explore technology like Passthrough, which lets them engage with objects and interfaces in an entirely new way and lets them be present in their physical environment. And of course, the simplicity of the game played a huge role. I tried to create a good introductory MR/VR experience by making it accessible to non-gamers and first-time users of this new technology. However, it wasn’t an ‘overnight success.’ Game development took almost three years, and it required a lot of perseverance and a bootstrapped approach to development.”

As for best practices, Van Bouwel recommends that developers test early and often and bring the community along for the ride.

“Playtest as much as you can, specifically with MR and Hand Tracking,” he says. “We had a demo on Steam and had many early playtesters before pitching the game to the Meta Quest Store. At every stage of the development process, we shared things publicly with our community on social media—this helped us drive awareness and early interest. Also, it’s important to know that there are things you can’t control, like platform-level technical hiccups that come with the territory for new tech. When you encounter these types of issues, it’s important to be patient and communicative; in my experience Meta's Developer Relations team has been very open and responsive to feedback and bug reports.”

Mobile devices have been helpful tools for introducing people to guided meditation practices, and now Meta Quest is ushering in a new era of mindfulness thanks to features only possible with MR. The TRIPP app is a prime example, enabling people to deepen their meditation and breathwork practice without distraction by using a VR headset to immerse themselves in beautiful and tranquil environments.

TRIPP’s use of Passthrough has been key to creating a calming experience that people use to unwind, while giving them control over what’s going on around them and how they’re feeling. We caught up with TRIPP CEO and Co-Founder Nanea Reeves to learn about the development process for integrating key Presence Platform capabilities and how it’s led to an increase in Daily Active Users (DAU).

“With TRIPP, we asked ourselves how we could architect new and fantastical experiences that people can’t access in real life,” Reeves says. “We knew MR could help with this, but we only wanted to incorporate it in ways that were truly functional and could directly enhance the user experience. This inspired our ‘streak and reward system,’ allowing users to unlock unique AR gifts once they maintain a streak of three days or more (one example being a portal that opens within your room using Passthrough, where you can see into another galaxy).”

For TRIPP, Presence Platform capabilities were key in giving users more control over their in-app experience.

“There’s a ‘dimmer switch’ within the app interface that allows people to decide how immersed they want to be, from full VR immersion to partial immersion (where they can see most of their physical surroundings using Passthrough),” explains Reeves. “We want users to have agency over how they feel and what’s happening around them, so they can tailor their experience depending on their mood or external distractions like people being in the same room as them. Giving people the ability to control the level of MR in layers also means they can engage with the app differently each time. It’s an aspect that people have responded very positively to, leading to an uptick in engagement.”

Asked to share tips or best practices developers should keep in mind as they build for MR apps, Reeves had this to say:

“Make sure you’re not just incorporating MR as a gimmick. Pause to ask yourself, ‘How does this MR feature benefit the user, and why will they want this?’ Additionally, think about how you’ll onboard people to your MR experience. As developers, we’re familiar with the tech, but the reality is most of our potential users aren't. Educating users is a big part of this. We created a launch tutorial to provide more guidance and saw engagement go up as a result.”

Incorporating Passthrough features in a thoughtful way helped TRIPP boost their Daily Active Users (DAU), with their seven-day average increasing by 31%. Stay tuned for new updates to TRIPP in future, as the team focuses on increasing the shareability of in-app content and worlds and leveraging ‘mood data’ to develop even more personalized experiences.

Now that you’ve seen how Presence Platform capabilities like Passthrough and Spatial Anchors are helping developers experiment with new use cases and leading to increased user retention for Quest Store apps like Cubism and TRIPP, it’s time to start putting these tips into practice. Keep these best practices in mind as you leverage MR tools, and you’ll be on your way to producing impactful results. For more examples and guidance on Meta Quest APIs, check out our MR showcase, Discover, now on GitHub.