Posted by Matthew McCullough – VP of Product Administration, Android Developer

Since launching the Android XR SDK Developer Preview alongside Samsung, Qualcomm, and Unity final yr, we’ve been blown away by the entire pleasure we’ve been listening to from the broader Android group. Whether or not it is by coding live-streams or native Google Developer Group talks, it has been an excellent expertise taking part in the neighborhood to construct the way forward for XR collectively, and we’re simply getting began.

At this time we’re excited to share an replace to the Android XR SDK: Developer Preview 2, filled with new options and enhancements that will help you develop useful and pleasant immersive experiences with acquainted Android APIs, instruments and open requirements created for XR.

At Google I/O, we now have two technical classes associated to Android XR. The primary is Constructing differentiated apps for Android XR with 3D content material, which covers many options current in Jetpack SceneCore and ARCore for Jetpack XR. The long run is now, with Compose and AI on Android XR covers creating XR-differentiated UI and our imaginative and prescient on the intersection of XR with cutting-edge AI capabilities.

What’s new in Developer Preview 2

For the reason that launch of Developer Preview 1, we’ve been targeted on making the APIs simpler to make use of and including new immersive Android XR options. Your suggestions has helped us form the event of the instruments, SDKs, and the platform itself.

With the Jetpack XR SDK, now you can play again 180° and 360° movies, which might be stereoscopic by encoding with the MV-HEVC specification or by encoding view-frames adjacently. The MV-HEVC customary is optimized and designed for stereoscopic video, permitting your app to effectively play again immersive movies at nice high quality. Apps constructed with Jetpack Compose for XR can use the SpatialExternalSurface composable to render media, together with stereoscopic movies.

Utilizing Jetpack Compose for XR, now you can additionally outline layouts that adapt to completely different XR show configurations. For instance, use a SubspaceModifier to specify the dimensions of a Subspace as a share of the system’s really useful viewing dimension, so a panel effortlessly fills the house it is positioned in.

Materials Design for XR now helps extra part overrides for TopAppBar, AlertDialog, and ListDetailPaneScaffold, serving to your large-screen enabled apps that use Materials Design effortlessly adapt to the brand new world of XR.

In ARCore for Jetpack XR, now you can monitor arms after requesting the suitable permissions. Palms are a group of 26 posed hand joints that can be utilized to detect hand gestures and produce a complete new degree of interplay to your Android XR apps:

For extra steering on growing apps for Android XR, try our Android XR Fundamentals codelab, the updates to our Hi there Android XR pattern venture, and a brand new model of JetStream with Android XR help.

The Android XR Emulator has additionally acquired updates to stability, help for AMD GPUs, and is now totally built-in inside the Android Studio UI.

Builders utilizing Unity have already efficiently created and ported present video games and apps to Android XR. At this time, you possibly can improve to the Pre-Launch model 2 of the Unity OpenXR: Android XR bundle! This replace provides many efficiency enhancements similar to help for Dynamic Refresh Price, which optimizes your app’s efficiency and energy consumption. Shaders made with Shader Graph now help SpaceWarp, making it simpler to make use of SpaceWarp to scale back compute load on the system. Hand meshes at the moment are uncovered with occlusion, which allows reasonable hand visualization.

Try Unity’s improved Combined Actuality template for Android XR, which now consists of help for occlusion and protracted anchors.

We just lately launched Android XR Samples for Unity, which display capabilities on the Android XR platform similar to hand monitoring, aircraft monitoring, face monitoring, and passthrough.

The Firebase AI Logic for Unity is now in public preview! This makes it simple so that you can combine gen AI into your apps, enabling the creation of AI-powered experiences with Gemini and Android XR. The Firebase AI Logic totally helps Gemini’s capabilities, together with multimodal enter and output, and bi-directional streaming for immersive conversational interfaces. Constructed with manufacturing readiness in thoughts, Firebase AI Logic is built-in with core Firebase providers like App Examine, Distant Config, and Cloud Storage for enhanced safety, configurability, and knowledge administration. Be taught extra about this on the Firebase weblog or go straight to the Gemini API utilizing Vertex AI in Firebase SDK documentation to get began.

Persevering with to construct the longer term collectively

Our dedication to open requirements continues with the glTF Interactivity specification, in collaboration with the Khronos Group. which will likely be supported in glTF fashions rendered by Jetpack XR later this yr. Fashions utilizing the glTF Interactivity specification are self-contained interactive belongings that may have many pre-programmed behaviors, like rotating objects on a button press or altering the colour of a fabric over time.

Android XR will likely be accessible first on Samsung’s Venture Moohan, launching later this yr. Quickly after, our companions at XREAL will launch the following Android XR system. Codenamed Venture Aura, it’s a conveyable and tethered system that provides customers entry to their favourite Android apps, together with these which were constructed for XR. It is going to launch as a developer version, particularly so that you can start creating and experimenting. The most effective information? With the acquainted instruments you utilize to construct Android apps at present, you possibly can construct for these units too.

The Google Play Retailer can also be preparing for Android XR. It is going to listing supported 2D Android apps on the Android XR Play Retailer when it launches later this yr. If you’re engaged on an Android XR differentiated app, you will get it prepared for the massive launch and be one of many first differentiated apps on the Android XR Play Retailer:

And we all know lots of you’re excited for the way forward for Android XR on glasses. We’re shaping the developer expertise now and can share extra particulars on how one can take part later this yr.

To get began creating and growing for Android XR, try developer.android.com/develop/xr the place you can see the entire instruments, libraries, and sources you’ll want to work with the Android XR SDK. Specifically, check out our samples and codelabs.

We welcome your suggestions, options, and concepts as you’re serving to form Android XR. Your ardour, experience, and daring concepts are important as we proceed to develop Android XR collectively. We sit up for seeing your XR-differentiated apps when Android XR units launch later this yr!

Discover this announcement and all Google I/O 2025 updates on io.google beginning Could 22.