Andy Biar

Software Architect, XR @unity, formerly @TheWaveXR, @warnerbros & @NBCUniversal · interactive entertainment & geospatial AR

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

My Unite talk is live! It covers:

- The latest XR features in Unity 6
- async/await
- New package: XR Composition Layers
- VR Multiplayer Template
- Polyspatial 2

Link in 🧵

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

Our XR product team is running a survey right now. We'd love to hear from you if you are a Unity XR developer! https://t.co/sg2vUbA26q

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@michae1becker @hybridherbst I do wonder what sort of market research Google did when choosing the name. Apple choosing different names for different operating systems helps with this. The only Android-branded alternative I can think of is "Android Spatial".

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@hybridherbst (Note that we named com.unity.xr.meta-openxr before Meta announced Horizon OS)

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@hybridherbst Why do you think this name is horrible? It follows our existing convention:

com.unity.xr.<runtime name>-openxr

The runtime is named Android XR.

[Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic]

Just announced at Unity’s Unite 2025 show in Barcelona: Unity has built an amazing new networking protocol enabling Unity games to come into Fortnite next year. This will enable an incredible variety of games to reach a new audience in new ways!

[David Helgason @davidhelgason]

I don’t talk a lot about Unity here, but I remain on the board and as a major shareholder in my old baby, now turned a young adult.

It puts a big smile on my face to be able to announce a partnership with my old frenemies up in Raleigh 🥰

CC @TimSweeneyEpic

[Tim Walz @Tim_Walz]

Most Republicans are good people. Most Democrats are good people.

The White House says outrageous things to make you hate your neighbor.

Your neighbor isn’t the problem. The White House is.

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@thejuanlam Wow it's been a minute since I logged into X, but glad you saw this! We immediately also needed this property once you pointed out that it was missing.

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

Release day! I've been working on Unity support for the new OpenXR Spatial Entities extensions, and today we shipped a public native API in OpenXR Plug-in 1.16.0-pre.1: https://t.co/Hu6nEKalzn

This API is a pure C# port of the OpenXR spec, currently limited to spatial entities.

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@DePanther Ping me here or in Discussions if you have feedback! https://t.co/XTu70XTq28

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@thejuanlam We can do public getters on the ARTrackable-derived types. We have also talked about an API that would let you query for all top-level parents, which would let you traverse the Transform hierarchy in the other direction. Thoughts?

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@hybridherbst @DePanther I'm not sure! Possibly none at this time, but many of the key players in Khronos are working on it right now.

Somebody please correct me if there's a public implementation out there already!

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@DiegoUSDZ Our AR Foundation Samples app is a good starting point. Works on Meta Quest and Android XR: https://t.co/6drrC79yWj

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@DePanther Keep in mind that AR Foundation will always be the most widely supported abstraction because it works on both OpenXR and non-OpenXR runtimes.

But better OpenXR tooling benefits both Unity and the broader community as well.

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@DePanther Yeah! It only works if your app is running on an OpenXR runtime that implements the Spatial Entities extensions (https://t.co/Uzclwl0F6o), but it's definitely intended to be used by both Unity and third parties.

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@thejuanlam What is your use case for reading the parent ID? We can put public getters on ARBoundingBox, etc, but is that all you need?

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@thejuanlam You should be able to DM now.. I think I have it set to mutuals only.

Hm, reading the parent ID is kinda difficult from AR Foundation. The XRBoundingBox struct has a public parent ID, but the ARBoundingBox MonoBehaviour doesn't expose it.

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

@thejuanlam So in OpenXR Meta 2.2, we now populate a `parentId` field on our trackables, and AR Foundation spawns GameObjects in a hierarchy based on their parent. (In OpenXR Meta, parents are rooms.)

We probably didn't document this well enough. DM me if you want to chat more!

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

Unity will also depend on this native API for our own internal products, including future AR Foundation support for spatial entities.

[Andy Biar @andybiar]

If you are an OpenXR app developer working in Unity and you want the lowest-level control, this API will save you a lot of time otherwise spent on C# interop.