Major News & Updates for VR & Mixed Reality Developers from Meta Connect 2023

Meta Connect 2023 kicked off today with the announcement you’ve been waiting for: Meta Quest 3 is officially launching on October 10, 2023! Available for pre-order today starting at $499.99 USD, Quest 3 is a world-class mixed reality (MR) device that packs a punch with major performance upgrades, crisper visuals, enhanced support for natural interactions, and more responsive inputs that can empower you to build more delightful and engaging experiences.

Simply put, it’s a great time to be building on Meta Quest. Our platform continues to grow across all app genres, and developers of all sizes are growing sustainable businesses. Over $2 billion has been spent on the Meta Quest Store, with one in 12 titles having earned more than $10 million in gross revenue. App Lab is also cementing itself as a valuable avenue for new and accomplished studios to drive growth. Roblox launched first on App Lab so people could start to explore the wide variety of experiences that it has to offer, while others like Ghosts of Tabor have used it to quickly grow an audience and scale.

With Quest 3 at your doorstep, there’s even more opportunity to grow your business. Keep reading for details on how Quest 3, improvements to Presence Platform, and brand-new tools can help you accomplish more and build a bigger audience.

Quest 3 delivers twice the GPU power of Quest 2, nearly 30% more pixels, and a nearly 33% increase in CPU power. Coupled with a slimmer, more comfortable form factor, this means your experiences can perform even better while audiences can remain immersed for longer.

We’ve been working on ways to help more developers build real-time 3D experiences that look and feel amazing. Take Dynamic Resolution for example. This recent performance optimization feature lets you maintain a solid frame rate by automatically adjusting the resolution of the display based on GPU workload. When the GPU is saturated, resolution can be lowered to maintain the frame rate. When it’s idle, resolution is increased to produce the crispest image and take advantage of Quest 3’s additional headroom.

Your immersive experiences will look sharp on Quest 3 thanks to our new pancake lenses. Quest 3 also delivers a nearly 15% wider field of view compared to Quest 2, along with increased pixel density to 25 PPD and 1,218 PPI, so people can see your environments come to life with precision and clarity.

These hardware upgrades can deliver a more enjoyable user experience across a variety of apps, and upcoming titles like Asgard’s Wrath 2, Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, and others offer a preview of the amazing apps and games being built to harness Quest 3’s performance capabilities.

Quest 3 is our next-generation headset that gives you the technology to deliver rich, high-fidelity MR across a broad range of social, gaming, fitness, productivity, and educational experiences. Soon, you’ll be able to leverage 10x the pixels of Quest 2’s Passthrough video capabilities to let users see the physical world in richer detail, then increase immersion with high-fidelity interactive virtual elements that give people an entirely new perspective on the world around them.

Support for intelligent, adaptive MR powered by AI on Quest 3 sets the stage for you to expand how your audience engages, explores, and plays with the environment you’ve created—all while staying present in their physical space. To help you drive engagement and create dynamic experiences that feel real on Quest 3, we’re also launching brand-new features that allow your app to intelligently understand and interact with objects in the physical space, including:

Developers have already started integrating MR features like Passthrough to drive positive outcomes for their businesses. For example, TRIPP recently saw an uptick in daily active users (DAU), with its seven-day average increasing by 31% after incorporating Passthrough-based features.

There’s no one right way to integrate MR, and apps leaning into the possibilities of MR like Demeo, Wooorld, Immersed, and more show its potential for engaging audiences and building presence for a variety of use cases. And earlier this year, developer teams showed us a glimpse of what’s possible as they built MR apps for fitness, fashion, and more at our Presence Platform Hackathon.

Quest 3 will bring even more possibilities to enhance the way people interact and explore with high-fidelity MR, and we’ve invested in resources to help you get started like our new MR design guidelines that break down the basics of MR, show what you can do with it, and provide best practices for designing engaging MR experiences.

Regardless of whether or not you choose to blend the physical and virtual worlds with MR or stick to fully immersive VR, interactions and inputs play an invaluable role in heightening immersion. We’ve added new features and bolstered existing capabilities to give you more ways to engage your audience using a variety of interactions and input methods.

To learn more about how you can deliver rich interactions with Presence Platform on Quest 3, tune in for the Connect session “Action, Reaction: Turning Inputs Into Interactions.”

Soon you’ll be able to level up social presence by creating more realistic digital representations of people thanks to new capabilities like inside-out body tracking, which uses cameras on Quest 3 to support greater upper-body tracking accuracy.

For the first time, you’ll be able to generate responsive legs and integrate natural leg movements for your app’s users using only the position of their upper body with Presence Platform’s Movement SDK. By accurately representing common leg movements like standing, walking, and jumping, you can help keep your audience more engaged in a variety of use cases.

This is just a glimpse into the improvements coming to Movement SDK that can help you enhance presence on Quest. Be sure to tune in for the Connect session “Get Moving with Movement SDK” to learn more about inside-out body tracking, generative legs, and more.

We’ve invested in step-change improvements for our platform tools that make it easier for you to go from setup to build to test quickly. The Project Setup Tool lets you spend less time setting up our SDKs thanks to automatic alerts that inform you about issues that may impact your project. Best of all, these alerts are categorized based on urgency to help you prioritize what’s required, recommended, and optional. If you’re looking for an easier way to integrate the latest capabilities from Presence Platform on Unity, Building Blocks can help by letting you simply drag and drop background Passthrough, Camera Rigs, Room Models, Grabbable Items, and much more right into your Unity scene so they’re ready to go.

Once you’ve added the capabilities you want, you can launch Meta XR Simulator to test your project and see it come to life—all without having to put on your headset. Meta XR Simulator lets you simulate headset and controller inputs using your keyboard, mouse, or a game controller, and new features like the Synthetic Environment Server (SES) let you load synthetic maps that simulate Presence Platform features like Scene, Passthrough, and Shared Spatial Anchors.

One of the primary factors impacting developers’ long-term success is monetization. As our platform has grown, we’ve worked to launch several self-serve monetization features and programs that you can set up on your own to get deeper insights into your audience, acquire new users, and boost sales throughout your app’s lifecycle—all the way from pre- to post-launch. These tools can help you capitalize on the launch of Quest 3 as people look to engage with immersive experiences on our next-generation headset.

We’re continuing to bolster our suite of monetization tools to help you grow your business and get data-driven insights with accompanying analytics. To learn about effective ways to grow your business on the Meta Quest Store and App Lab, tune in for the Connect sessions “Growing Your VR Business on Meta Quest” and “Unlocking Your App’s Potential on App Lab.”

These are just some of the many announcements we shared during the Meta Connect Keynote and Developer State of the Union. Follow the session list and tune in live to learn how AI tools like Code Llama are unlocking possibilities to streamline your workflow using pretrained models to generate robust code, and discover how Meta Spark is helping over 750 million developers unlock their creativity with new templates, profiling tools, realistic animations, and more.

We couldn’t be more excited about the future of Meta Quest, and we can’t wait to see how you use new capabilities and features to capture the imagination of audiences and grow your business. We’re still only on day one of Connect, so be sure to tune in @MetaforDevelopers for developer sessions on new and updated tools, programs and features across AI, VR, MR, Meta Horizon Worlds, and Meta Avatars.