Mar 27, 2025

Quarterly Developer Recap: Tracked Keyboard, Hand Gestures, WebXR PWAs and more

Today we’re excited to share several updates designed to support benefit developers building 3D, 2D and web-based experiences. Whether you’re working in Unity to build an app that revolutionizes productivity, looking to add interactive storytelling to your website or want to apply your existing Android development skills toward creating a panel app for entertainment, these updates can provide you with the capabilities and tools you need to build efficiently and enhance user experiences for nearly any use case.

Dive in below to unlock the latest updates for building 3D, 2D and web-based experiences for Horizon OS.

Use Any Keyboard on Quest with the Updated Keyboard Tracker

The tracked keyboard on Quest 3 and Quest 3S just received a major upgrade to enable seamless tracking for nearly any keyboard or laptop. Horizon OS can now track the location of any keyboard within view so users can see their hands and physical keyboard via a dynamic Passthrough window. Support for typing with physical hands enables a comfortable typing experience to accelerate productivity, messaging and browsing use cases.

The tracked keyboard update enables accurate positioning to deliver a comfortable and flexible in-headset typing experience.

This update also delivers input suppression to eliminate accidental pinches that may unintentionally select buttons or move panels while typing. Together, these upgrades can make the in-headset typing far more intuitive, which in turn reduces friction and strengthens feelings of immersion across a variety of experiences. Get started with the tracked keyboard by visiting the documentation.

Simple and Intuitive Hand Gestures and Controller Locomotion

The launch of v74 delivers expanded controller locomotion support and a new set of hand microgestures that include tapping and thumb swiping. These new microgestures are compatible with Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, and Quest 3S, and are available to use on Unity and Native. Microgestures can make your user experience more comfortable and reduce fatigue by requiring less physical movement for repetitive hand interactions. They can also be applied to several use cases, including scrolling through virtual panels, selecting items via tapping, and locomotion. Learn a little bit more about both updates below.

Migrogestures Locomotion

Interaction SDK now supports a new hands-based teleportation interaction using microgestures. Microgestures can be powerful tools for VR locomotion, enabling you to move by simply aiming your fist and tapping with your thumb, or allowing you to turn by swiping your thumb left or right. Simple gestures like these closely align with familiar interactions on 2D interfaces, making them easy to learn, easy to remember and comfortable for users.

Microgestures offer a seamless and intuitive method of locomotion in VR.

Interaction SDK (ISDK) Controller Locomotion

We’ve expanded controller locomotion to support both teleport and smooth locomotion. Now you can leverage VR-specific features like dynamic user height, directional wall penetration, tunneling comfort options, and coordinating between in-headset movements and physical walking.

We are excited to see how you leverage these new capabilities to enhance navigation and create new use cases. To get started, visit the documentation.

Explore Updates to Meta Spatial SDK and Spatial Editor

Last year, we launched Meta Spatial SDK and Meta Spatial Editor as a way for developers to spatialize existing apps and quickly build 2D experiences for Meta Horizon OS. Now, we’re introducing updates that will help your projects reach the next level. These enhancements focus on improving the visual dynamics and interactivity of your panels, and the components used to build with Spatial Editor. Learn more about each update below.

Refined Cylinder Panels

Our Cylinder Panels have undergone a comprehensive refinement to enhance performance and versatility. Key improvements include:

Grabbable Bug Fix: We've resolved the grabbable bug to ensure smooth and reliable interactions with cylinder panels. This fix enhances the overall user experience by making interactions more dependable.

Backside Transparency: We've added transparency to the backside of the cylinder panels to enhance visual clarity and design flexibility. This update provides more creative freedom in your designs by enabling you to craft visually stunning and immersive environments.

Check out the improved panels with the Meta Spatial SDK by visiting the documentation.

XML Components and Meta Spatial Editor 2.0

Spatial Editor 2.0 now includes a new component system that lets you define and manage components using XML, enhancing both flexibility and ease of management. We’ve also added a new button to the component list in Spatial Editor that allows you to synchronize the latest changes from the XML components.

The new component XML offers a simpler way to define components and provides efficiency by automatically generating optimally performant Kotlin Component code based on the XML you’ve written.

Last but not least, component XML significantly improves the Spatial Editor workflow by eliminating the need to restart the tool when syncing component updates. Now Spatial Editor can understand default values for component attributes and allows you to refresh component updates while the tool is running.

To learn more about these features, refer to our documentation on Spatial SDK Components and Spatial Editor Components.

Introducing WebXR PWAs: A New Era for Immersive Web Experiences on Meta Horizon

As of the v72 update, we’ve launched WebXR Progressive Web App (PWAs) support to give web developers a powerful new way to create and monetize immersive VR experiences. We’ve also made WebXR PWAs much easier to access for users. Now, anyone can discover and download PWAs directly from the Meta Horizon Store and access them instantly in their library.

PWAs are now available to download in the Meta Horizon Store and can be launched from your library.

Learn more about WebXR PWAs and how to prepare them for distribution below.

Seamless Immersion with WebXR PWAs

With WebXR PWAs, you can deliver native-like immersive experiences directly from the web while ensuring seamless integration with Meta Horizon OS. This new capability allows apps to jump into immersive mode immediately after launching to eliminate the need for a 2D landing page. In addition to these exciting capabilities, developers can now monetize their WebXR PWAs via In-App Purchases (IAP), with support for Subscriptions coming soon.

Preparing your WebXR Experience

Before packaging your WebXR experience as a PWA, we recommend testing it in the Browser to identify any compatibility or performance issues. Our Browser Getting Started guide provides essential information, including the User Agent string and supported content sizes. Additionally, you can connect Chrome Developer Tools to a Quest device for debugging purposes. To ensure your PWA is ready for the Meta Horizon Store, use the Meta forked Bubblewrap library to package your website into an APK file.

Visit our developer documentation to learn more and start building WebXR PWAs today.

Elevating the WebXR Developer Experience with @IWER/DevUI v1.0 and IWE v2.0

To round out our list of updates, we’re sharing the official launch of @IWER/DevUI⁠ v1.0, our new developer UI designed to integrate with the Immersive Web Emulation Runtime (IWER). @IWER/DevUI provides full control of an emulated WebXR device via an intuitive overlay UI on top of your development environment, making it ideal for building and testing WebXR apps.

Since its early debut last year, the tool has evolved significantly and now offers a suite of features designed to enhance the WebXR developer experience:

Hand-tracking emulation support: Seamlessly switch between controllers and hand input at runtime. The emulation supports multiple built-in poses and allows for any number of custom poses provided by developers.

Easy connect/disconnect of input sources: Effortlessly disconnect and reconnect individual controller or hand inputs at any time. This feature addresses a major challenge in WebXR development by enabling the emulation of input edge cases.

Precise transform control of emulated devices: Input numerical values directly to control the positions and rotations of emulated controllers, hands and headsets with precision.

OfferSession support: Experiences utilizing the offerSession API will feature an "Enter XR" button on the landing page, emulating the "Enter VR" button in the browser's address bar. This can also help you test offerSession behavior on desktop.

Complete UI overhaul: A major redesign of the UI based on user feedback enhances usability and aesthetics.

The new IWER + @IWER/DevUI setup offers the widest compatibility ever for a WebXR emulation tool to support all major 3D frameworks on the web with WebXR.

Immersive Web Emulator 2.0 features an all-new WebXR runtime and an overhauled UI.

Additionally, the Immersive Web Emulator (IWE), our WebXR emulation browser extension with over 12,000 active installs, is receiving a major upgrade. With this new version of IWER + @IWER/DevUI, you can enjoy the same emulation experience without manual integration. Try it out early with the v2.0 preview release⁠.

Stay tuned for more updates

As the Horizon OS ecosystem grows, we look forward to delivering impactful tools and cutting-edge capabilities that make development smooth, seamless, and accessible, regardless of what type of experience you want to build.

If you have feedback about the new features and capabilities we just shared, be sure to let us know via the Feedback Tool in MQDH. To discover more product updates, tips and developer news, follow us on X⁠ and Facebook⁠, and make sure to subscribe to our monthly newsletter in your Developer Dashboard settings⁠.

Apps

Design

Locomotion

Native SDK

Quest

Unity

WebXR

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