At Meta, our core philosophy is that a vibrant, multi-platform development community is critical to the success of spatial and immersive computing. Since 2016, we’ve played a major role in pioneering the OpenXR standard and have invested heavily to ensure its success by benefiting developers building cross-platform.
Starting with our v74 SDK, available next week, the built-in OpenXR path for all major game engines will be a recommended path for development. Developers building on Unity, Unreal and Godot can leverage OpenXR to build across platforms and access Meta platform plugins to add features unique to Horizon OS. Dive in to learn more about OpenXR paths for each engine.
Game Engine Specifics
Below you can learn how to leverage OpenXR using recommended development paths for Unity, Unreal and Godot:
- Unity: As of Unity's OpenXR Plugin 1.14, the OpenXR Meta package has achieved feature and performance parity with the Oculus XR plugin, letting developers migrate to a more cross-platform development experience. Developers can utilize Horizon OS-specific features through extensions and the Meta XR Core SDK, and continue optimizing their content to take advantage of all our platform features. Find more details by visiting the documentation.
- Unreal: Developers can build for head-mounted XR experiences with OpenXR and Unreal. They can also build using the Meta Github fork release of Unreal to access features specific to the Horizon OS platform. Because Unreal Engine provides source code access, developers can also modify either path to suit their development needs. More details, including a trade-off table, will be published with our v74 SDK. To learn more about developing with Unreal for Horizon OS, visit our documentation.
- Godot: Developers can use Godot’s direct OpenXR integration for all core XR features. Horizon OS-specific features can also be utilized through the Godot OpenXR Vendors plugin, which provides access to other vendor-specific features as well. With Godot, developers have access to full source code and can modify and redistribute as needed. Learn more by visiting the documentation.
Advancing the OpenXR Standard
Since ensuring that our OpenXR runtimes for Meta Quest and PC were 100% OpenXR compliant in 2019, we have pushed to continue advancing OpenXR as a viable cross-device solution. We are continuously creating new XR technologies to enable unique and immersive experiences, exposed as OpenXR extensions. We also build libraries to support these new extensions. As part of our commitment to OpenXR, we contribute these advancements back to the community, allowing other companies to adopt and build upon them.
In fact, Meta has contributed to 33 (~67%) of Khronos and cross-vendor extensions, as well as 61 vendor-specific extensions. Among those vendor-specific extensions, many of them (e.g. SpaceWarp, foveation, passthrough, etc.) are adopted by other OpenXR vendors for the better interoperability with apps that were originally developed for Meta devices. These contributions have been adopted by other vendors who recognize Meta's dedication to advancing the industry and contributing back to the standard.
Meta’s Commitment to OpenXR
As early adopters of OpenXR, Meta has contributed significant resources to both expanding the standard and enabling OpenXR support in popular game engines. We remain committed to OpenXR and will continue to invest in the success of OpenXR and our developers.
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