Meta Spatial SDK is now available for developers.
Until now, building even a simple app for Quest headsets required using a full-fledged game engine like Unity, Unreal, or Godot. These are heavy tools that require importing swathes of assets or reinventing the wheel to achieve simple interfaces and interactions.
"With Spatial SDK, Meta Quest devices become another form factor in your mobile development process, rather than a completely new technology stack."
Meta Spatial SDK changes this by letting developers use their existing mobile app development tools. That includes IDEs like Android Studio, the Kotlin programming language, and existing mobile frameworks and libraries such as 2D UI frameworks.
Meta Spatial Editor
Whether building a new app or porting a 2D Android app, Meta Spatial SDK's key feature is to allow developers to add 3D elements or immersive experiences to these traditionally developed apps.
It provides rendering, optional passthrough, controller and hand tracking, support for flatscreen and immersive media playback, physics, and spatial audio.
Developers could, for example, easily add a 360 photo viewer, or a floating 3D model, without writing any rendering or lighting code. They can also use Meta Spatial SDK to create fully immersive apps that consist of multiple floating windows and 3D elements.
A new Meta Spatial Editor will allow developers to position, scale, and arrange the 2D and 3D elements of their apps without a game engine editor.
Demo app built with Meta Spatial SDK.
Meta Spatial SDK seems to be Meta's response to Apple's suite of native visionOS development tools, which offer developers the ability to extend their iOS & iPadOS apps or build new visionOS apps with the same tech stack they're used to for those traditional devices, and also without a game engine.
Meta Spatial SDK should dramatically reduce the cost and time needed to bring spatial computing apps to Horizon OS, and we'll keep an eye on the platform to see whether this leads to a new wave of apps.
Interested developers can start working with Meta Spatial SDK now.
