Unlock New Possibilities in Mixed Reality with Tools and Features from Meta Connect 2024

At Meta Connect, our executives and product experts took you on a deep dive into several technologies shaping the future—and one area that truly captured the spotlight was mixed reality. New capabilities and advances are enabling developers of all skill levels and areas of expertise to build even more dynamic experiences.

We’ve invested in expanding our developer suite of tools and capabilities to help you streamline development and innovate with groundbreaking mixed reality technologies—whether you’re new to mixed reality or a seasoned pro. The library of mixed reality experiences available on the Meta Horizon OS is expanding to include opportunities for developers with experience building for mobile, web, and other platforms.

Below, we take a closer look at why building mixed reality experiences is more rewarding and easier to start than ever before. Explore announcements from Connect 2024 that reveal how new improvements, tools, and capabilities can elevate your vision and power you to build it out faster.

Since last year’s Connect, we’ve made major updates to help you develop mixed reality experiences that feel more dynamic, realistic, and enjoyable without sacrificing performance.

Here’s a brief recap:

We shared the newest additions to our expanding suite of mixed reality capabilities that allow you to support more vibrant expressions, fluid interactions, and realistic spatial sound.

Explore more ways to harness and design with the power of new technologies in your mixed reality project by watching the Connect sessions “Momentum in mixed reality” and “Paths and pitfalls of mixed reality design.”

During the developer keynote, we announced that Meta Quest devices are Unity 6 ready, and we will have a new build-target and cache improvements that reduce build times by up to 90%. Launching in Unity 6.1, Unity will also be adding a dedicated build profile for Meta Quest, making it significantly easier and faster to configure your projects. The process will be cut from 36 steps to just seven, and when you choose this new platform from the platform browser, Unity 6 provides sensible defaults for platform build settings, preconfigured build profile settings overrides, and recommended and required packages.

Even if you’re relatively new to developing immersive apps, building mixed reality experiences doesn’t necessarily require extensive experience. We’ve introduced several new tools and resources to accelerate your process building both single-player and multiplayer mixed reality apps, including MRUK (Unity | Unreal), a rich set of utilities and tools on top of Scene API that are designed to perform common operations.

At Connect, we introduced new additions to MRUK that elevate the tool’s ability to streamline mixed reality development and focus on what makes your app unique.

Together, these features can help you be more efficient with how you develop against users’ physical environments—and more creative with how users interact with them.

In addition we showcased Immersive Debugger in our workshops and session.This convenient companion tool provides a solution for debugging without needing to take off your headset, helping to cut down iteration time across different roles in your organization.

To learn about ways to accelerate and simplify mixed reality development, check out the Connect session, “Get started with mixed reality.”

Of course, mixed reality also involves interactions between users and virtual elements, including UIs. To help you create high-quality UI that delivers intuitive visual feedback, robust input modality support, and consistent interaction behaviors, we're excited to announce the launch of Interaction SDK UI sets in October on Unity and Figma.

These UI sets provide essential components and patterns that support both controller and hand interactions, aligning with the Meta Quest design system. Plus with theming capability, you can easily customize the UI Sets to reflect your app's unique branding.

Previously, making a canvas pokeable or an object grabbable in Interaction SDK was a time-consuming process involving connecting individual components or inserting them into prefabs. To help you expedite interaction implementation, we recently launched Interaction SDK Quick Actions. This feature enables you to easily add interactions to your Unity scenes via a right-click context menu. Get started with Interaction SDK Quick Actions by visiting the documentation.

We’re also excited to announce that Unreal support for Interaction SDK will arrive with v69 on Unreal Engine 5.4 and later. The Interaction SDK Unreal integration works with the Meta XR Unreal Plugin to provide high-quality interactions previously only available for Unity, such as Raycast, Poke, Grab & Throw, and one- and two-handed object transformations.

In v69, we’re also introducing cross-platform support for Meta Haptics Studio (Windows | Mac), enabling you to utilize all your haptics assets for Quest devices across PCVR and other HMDs too. With Haptics Studio and Haptics SDK (Unity | Unreal | Native), you have effective solutions for heightening sensation and elevating presence within your mixed reality or VR experience.

On the topic of interactions, there’s another important type that can help distinguish your mixed reality experience: users’ interactions with each other. With the help of our new Multiplayer Building Blocks, you can quickly drag and drop several core multiplayer features included in the Meta XR Core SDK into your Unity project, including colocation, auto-matchmaking, player voice chat, and more. We now have 30 Building Blocks across the board to help you enable a variety of common features and functionality in your Unity projects.

Performance is vital to delivering user experiences that feel smooth and support fluid interactions between virtual and physical objects. Since last year’s Connect, we’ve shipped numerous features to elevate CPU and GPU performance and help you improve the quality of your mixed reality experiences.

To learn about more recent performance improvements on Meta Quest devices, check out the Connect session, “State of Compute 2024: Maximizing Performance on Meta Quest.”

As mixed reality has become more robust and supported on Meta Quest devices, we’ve heard your feedback about the need for effective capture tools that go beyond what our Mixed Reality Capture solution offers. Thanks to our recent multi-year partnership with LIV.tv, we’re excited to share that LIV SDK is now available to help you capture authentic mixed reality content using a PC with an external camera in both immersive VR apps and MR apps.

Now you can conveniently produce trailers, social media content, or any number of video assets leveraging high-quality footage that contains mixed reality capabilities including Passthrough, Spatial Anchors, Scene, Occlusion, and more. With tools designed to help you highlight mixed reality in your app, you can effectively showcase the unique aspects of your experience to a wide audience.

We can’t wait to see how you use these tools to power your development journey and drive innovation in our shared ecosystem. If you want to learn about more opportunities with mixed reality and Meta Horizon OS, be sure to watch Connect developer sessions.

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