Dec 4, 2025

Quarterly Developer Recap: What’s New Across Meta Horizon OS

This quarter, we shipped new ways to build immersive web experiences, test VR and mixed reality apps, streamline iteration, and understand and connect with your audience. Whether you’re prototyping a new idea, making a major update to an existing app, or looking to explore new development paths, the past few months delivered updates that support both building and growing with Meta Horizon OS.

We know you’re busy, so here’s a quick overview to help you jump to an applicable section:

Tools to build

Meta XR Simulator 2.0

Instant placement with Environment Raycasting API

Immersive Web SDK

Tools to grow

Annotations in Analytics

Updates to the Organization Profiles

Developer Posts

Re-engagement Tool

Updates to IAPs for Bundles

Next, dive in below to unwrap these updates.

Part 1: Tools to Build Better Experiences

Meta XR Simulator Updates (v83)

Testing your app can be tedious and filled with endless tweaking and troubleshooting. But when your workflow mirrors real user environments that lets you iterate quickly, the process becomes smoother. The result pays dividends down the road when your app requires fewer fixes after publishing.

Meta XR Simulator delivers on these fronts with a full modernization that makes testing faster, smoother, and flexible (and not to mention a lot easier on your neck). You can now iterate your Unity, Unreal, and native projects without constant in-headset hopping, and the overall workflow feels more scalable from top to bottom thanks to a rebuilt interface, updated framework, and faster start up times.

Here are the highlights:

A modern synthetic environment selector built directly into the XR Simulator, replacing the old external SES tool.

Improved mixed reality room support, with easier access to environments beyond the standard living room setup.

More reliable multiplayer testing that reduces friction during quick iteration workflows.

Streamlined input simulation with visual controller mapping to preview real-world interactions.

Hot and cold-start functionality with load times under 4.4 seconds.

A standalone installation for Windows and Mac without per-project setup.

A fully redesigned UI that replaces imGUI and scales better for a wider range of app use cases.

Together, these improvements make Meta XR Simulator 2.0 one of the most meaningful quality-of-life upgrades of the year. To get started download the package (Windows or MacOS) for your preferred engine. If you have an older version of the XR Simulator in your current project, be sure to remove it for best results.

Instant Placement with the Environment Raycasting API

Placing virtual content on top of real-world objects and surfaces is one of the most common interactions in mixed reality. It’s also one of the fastest ways to onboard users to the magic of mixed reality experiences with minimal friction. The only problem is, previously, users needed to scan and configure their environment before objects could anchor correctly.

Now with the Environment Raycasting API, instant placement becomes a much more streamlined and smooth process by enabling users to drop content into their environment without completing Space Setup on their Meta Quest headset.

The Environment Raycasting API is designed to streamline content placement in mixed reality.

Instant placement is available on Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S in v81 through OpenXR and the Mixed Reality Utility Kit (MRUK). To get started, check out the Unity documentation and download the MRUK.

Building the Future of Immersive Web Experiences

Our newImmersive Web SDK (IWSDK) has steadily evolved since its early access launch at Meta Connect 2025. In just a couple months, we’ve introduced several major improvements to camera access, UI development, and physics simulation that make immersive web development less complex and faster to achieve.

Camera Access Made Simple

Support for camera access is now easier to integrate thanks to a new camera system that automatically discovers the correct camera, manages permissions, syncs the stream lifecycle with your session, and surfaces the feed as a ready-to-render texture.

The IWSDK supports seamless camera access to help you build for a variety of mixed reality use cases.

What once required a tedious list of steps now works by default. This is a huge quality-of-life update for any web experience that involves passthrough, scanning, or photo capture. To learn more, check out our section on camera access in our IWSDK guide.

Horizon Kit for Immersive UI

UI design is crucial for most if not all immersive apps, but for immersive web experiences specifically, it’s long been a challenge because HTML isn’t available in WebXR. Now with the Horizon Kit, building UI becomes straightforward thanks to an open source component library created by Bela Bohlender.

The Horizon Kit is designed to accelerate UI development for immersive web experiences.

Horizon Kit mirrors the Horizon OS design language and lets you build performant, native-feeling interfaces with very little setup. A dedicated VS Code extension makes building UI feel similar to writing HTML, and live preview support lets you iterate buttons, panels, or complex layouts instantly without the setup overhead.

Get started here.

Physics with Havok Integration

Since launch, the IWSDK physics system, powered by Havok, has continued to mature and improve. We’ve worked to make the system more robust and performant, and we’re excited to share that developers can now configure gravity, collisions, motion behavior, friction, restitution, and density with straightforward parameters.

The IWSDK physics system provides developers with full control over several key parameters to support dynamic, realistic physics.

Whether you want to support a specific feature like falling objects, or a full-on complex, interactive playground, the new physics integration gives you the foundation to make your scenes feel grounded, realistic, and dynamic.

If you’re ready to start building your first immersive web experience with IWSDK, follow our project setup guide to create your first project, or explore the source code on GitHub.

Part 2: Tools to Grow Faster

Annotations in Analytics

Since our last quarterly update, analytics received a helpful upgrade with reference annotations. These are small but valuable notes that you can attach directly to your analytics timeline to mark important events. Your teams can flag moments like bug fixes, content updates, new marketing pushes, and more to make it easy to tie changes or trends to specified events.

Annotations can help your team stay aligned on changing analytics trends and why they occurred.

Anyone with access to your organization’s analytics dashboard can view annotations, which can help large teams stay organized and in-sync when evaluating previous metrics and planning for the future.

Simply put, this feature makes it easier to look back at your data and understand the story behind your performance. To learn more, visit the documentation.

Updates to Organization Profiles

At Connect, we shared how new Organization Profiles in Meta Horizon serve as your central hub for apps, posts, events, and links that you want to share with your audience.

Since then, Organization Profiles gained several new features that make it easier to showcase your work and connect with players. The Horizon Store now features a dedicated shelf that highlights the top-followed organization profiles to provide an extra visibility boost and help people discover more of your studio’s content.

Organization Profiles are now featured on a dedicated shelf in the Horizon Store.

In addition to added visibility in the Store, you can also send notifications directly to your profile’s followers. These notifications give you a direct channel to share updates, launches, or important news, and they appear both in-headset and the Meta Horizon mobile app.

And if those upgrades weren’t enough, we’ve also added a new shelf where you can showcase up to three items, including apps, IAPs, or bundles when users click into your Organization Profile. We’re confident this simple change can lead to easy wins as users are guided toward your most recent and engaging content.

Developer Posts Get Interactive

Developer Posts have long served as an easy way to spread the word about new updates and news coming from your studio. Now, we’ve added support for user comments.

This feature lets you talk directly with your community, collect feedback, answer questions, and create conversations around your posts. Comments appear on both the web version of the Store and on the Horizon mobile app, giving you more surfaces to spark connections with your audience. You also have full moderation controls, so you can decide how the conversation flows. Learn more by visiting the documentation.

Target Users with the Re-engagement Tool

Also revealed at Connect, the new re-engagement tool helps you directly target people who have shown interest, but haven’t purchased your app. Currently, this feature lets you target users who have wishlisted your app with personalized discounts to incentivize purchases through push notifications.

To learn more and explore best practices, check out the documentation. We’re looking forward to expanding the tool to new user cohorts soon, so stay tuned in the coming months to get more value from the re-engagement tool.

Drive Extra Revenue with New Monetization Tools

We’re officially in the heart of the holiday season and one of the strongest periods for user engagement and spending. This means it’s the perfect time to take advantage of the latest monetization tools.

Exclusive IAPs (in-app purchases) for bundles: Now you can create IAPs that are exclusively available to purchase as part of a bundle. Users cannot purchase these IAPs on their own without purchasing the bundle that you’ve added them to.

Approved IAPs in bundles: Now you can also add IAPs to your bundle as soon as they are approved by our review team. This enables you to make your bundle and the individual IAP available for purchase at the same time, without any extra manual steps.

To explore best practices and steps to create content bundles, visit the documentation.

Wrapping Up 2025

This quarter closed out the year strong with a mix of quality-of-life upgrades, revamped features, and brand new tools that support every step of development for a variety of build paths. So whether you want to build faster, experiment with immersive web development, grow your audience, or test with greater efficiency, you now have the tools and features to get a leg up heading into 2026.

Find this content helpful? Be sure to check out our release notes, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and follow us on X and Facebook to be among the first to hear about the latest news and updates. If you have feedback on any of the tools and features we covered today, let us know via the Feedback Tool in Meta Quest Developer Hub.

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