If an app does not support focus awareness, Meta will flag it with a warning when submitted to the Meta Horizon Store. We recommend enabling the focus awareness feature early in your development process to test how your app handles the loss of input and let the system UI appear as an overlay.

This guide describes using overlays and focus awareness in your Unreal apps for Meta Quest applications.

Overlays are a feature that enables the Meta Quest system interface, such as the Universal Menu, to appear over an application without requiring the app to close. These overlays allow users to access system features such as social menus, settings, and more, which helps keep users engaged in the experience. For overlays to display correctly, your app must be focus-aware.

Apps should query for status changes, such as losing input focus or the presence of system overlays. When an overlay appears, apps can then take appropriate action. For example, when the universal menu appears over an app, it can continue running but pause gameplay because it has lost input focus.

The Meta XR Unreal integration provides the following support:

All Meta Quest apps must be focus-aware for the Store to accept them. Therefore, we’ve enabled focus awareness by default. This policy ensures users can reliably access the universal menu and system actions as overlays without interrupting the app.

To ensure your app operates smoothly with overlays, follow these guidelines:

When an overlay appears (such as when the user presses the Meta button), the running application loses input focus, and the HasInputFocus flag returns false.

You can query the status of input focus using a Blueprint or code. You should perform this query once during every frame render cycle.

Use OculusLibrary::HasInputFocus to query input status using Blueprints.

To query input focus status in C++, use code similar to the following:

ovrpBool HasFocus = ovrpBool_False;
if (OVRP_SUCCESS(ovrp_GetAppHasInputFocus(&HasFocus)))
{
    return HasFocus == ovrpBool_True;
}
else
{
    return false;
}

Ensure that your app takes the appropriate action when input focus is lost. Examples may include:

When the user dismisses the overlay, the application regains input focus, and the HasInputFocus flag returns true. In this case, you can resume gameplay or show the user’s input affordance.

The following example illustrates a typical implementation of hiding tracked controllers when the focus switches from the VRCharacter Blueprint to the system overlay.

For the Store requirement and testing steps related to focus awareness, see Quest VRC Input 4.

For information on enabling keyboard overlays for text input, see Enable keyboard overlays for text input.