Our new XR e-book is here: Build XR with Unity: Meta XR

Nov 6, 2026|5 Min

Eduardo Oriz - Unity Technologies

Senior Content Marketing Manager

XRMetaXRMetaTesting and performance

What's inside the guide

This e-book is for Unity XR developers who want to create a new title or port an existing app to Meta VR devices. Among other things, it explains how to do the following:

• Understand what sets Meta VR Glasses apart: a roughly 100-gram form factor, eye and hand tracking as primary input, and the same OS, store, and OpenXR stack as Quest, so existing Quest apps can run on them.
• Get started with Unity's VR template and test on a device, in the Editor with the XR Interaction Simulator, or with Meta XR Simulator.
• Use key XR Interaction Toolkit components: XR Origin, teleportation, grab interactables, spatial UI, and more.
• Support eye and hand tracking for Look and Pinch input, with fallbacks for users who don't grant eye tracking permission.
• Build a simple interactive VR scene step by step, from Editor setup to deploying on hardware.
• Optimize graphics with gaze-based foveated rendering, Quad Views, Application SpaceWarp, dynamic resolution, and Adaptive Performance.
• Speed up iteration with the new Unity CLI, the Unity Pipeline package, and AI agents.

DOWNLOAD THE E-BOOKDOWNLOAD THE E-BOOK

Continue scrolling for excerpts on the capabilities that Meta VR Glasses unlock, and on an AI-assisted build-test-verify workflow.

Capabilities to go deeper

Meta VR Glasses open up four capabilities for meaningful new experiences:

• Eye Tracking: Supports foveated rendering and gaze input, which can inform both visual quality and interaction design. Eye tracking data is private by default, so your app must request permission. Plan a fallback, such as hand raycasting, for users who decline.
• Quad Views Rendering: Renders each eye’s periphery at lower resolution than the center, cutting GPU cost while maintaining perceived visual quality, giving you more headroom for scene complexity.
• Spatial Audio: Unity supports 7.1.4 surround sound with Enhanced Audio Foundation, enabling Spatial Audio experiences for VR with seven surround channels, four height channels and a low-frequency effects channel. Select 7.1.4 in Output Channel Layout.
• 5K Infinite Display: The 5K Infinite Display uses micro-OLED panels with a per-eye resolution of 2412 x 2288 pixels at 37 PPD, compared with 25 PPD on Quest 3 with a higher contrast. Consider supporting high resolutions when possible to take full advantage of the Meta VR Glasses’ displays.

Get started with Unity's VR template

To run the template on a device, enable Developer mode, connect the headset, switch the platform to Meta Quest in File > Build Profiles, and select Build and Run. In Project Settings, check that OpenXR and both the Meta and Android XR feature groups are enabled. That runs the sample on Meta devices and keeps portability to other platforms open.

No headset at hand? The XR Interaction Simulator, part of the XR Interaction Toolkit package, lets you test interactions in the Editor. Windows users can also use Meta Horizon Link to launch the app on a device straight from the Editor, with no build-and-deploy step each time.

Optimize for the 5K display

Meta VR Glasses have more on-chip GPU memory than Meta Quest 3, so the tiled renderer can split each frame into fewer tiles. To use that headroom, the e-book covers:

• Gaze-based foveated rendering: Full resolution where the user is looking, lower elsewhere, with optional dynamic foveation that adjusts as GPU load changes
• Quad Views: Draws the central focus area at full resolution and the periphery at lower resolution
• Application SpaceWarp: Renders fewer frames while the runtime generates intermediate ones from motion and depth data
• Dynamic resolution and Adaptive Performance: Keep render resolution in range and respond to thermal or workload pressure to hold a stable frame rate

If you're porting a Quest 2 or Quest 3 project, reevaluate your foveated rendering approach: fixed foveated rendering returns a smaller saving on Meta VR Glasses. Whichever technique you choose, benchmark your app to confirm what performs best.

Build, test, and verify with Unity CLI and AI agents

Clicking through Editor panels can become a bottleneck for repetitive tasks and automation. The new Unity CLI and Unity Pipeline package give both developers and AI agents a fast, lightweight command-line interface into the Unity Editor. The Pipeline package turns the running Editor into a local background server, so scenes and asset databases stay warm in memory and there's no cold-start boot for every command.

Any agent that can run shell commands, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, and Gemini CLI, can control the Editor, build your app, and help fix errors. Unity's official plugins for Claude and Codex teach agents to do jobs the way Unity workflows are meant to work, and install 29 skills with a single command at launch.

To close the loop, Meta XR Operator lets an agent act inside the running XR app: inspect the scene, move the head, controllers, and hands, perform gestures like pinch, poke, and grab (including gaze-and-pinch for Meta VR Glasses), and capture the rendered view to verify the result. It's an experimental component, so use it for development and testing rather than as a production dependency, and keep testing comfort, tracking, and performance on physical hardware.

Download the e-book

Ready to Build for Meta VR Glasses? Download Build XR with Unity: Meta XR to get the full step-by-step walkthrough, including the interactive scene tutorial and links to samples, video tutorials, and Unity Learn resources.