Everything That's Coming in ViroReact 3.0.0 - September Office Hours Recap
At our September Office Hours event (a virtual event we hold each month to connect with our community), we walked through everything coming in ViroReact 3.0.0, along with the updates it unlocks across the wider ReactVision ecosystem.
We've been pretty open about some of these updates, while others were a nice surprise for our community.
This month's event was also a chance to take stock of the journey we've been on at ReactVision over the last couple of years: from an open-source community project, to a project within Morrow, to a standalone company building a comprehensive development stack for XR.
While putting my slides together, I pulled some data from our internal product roadmap: we've shipped over 300 individual updates across ViroReact, ReactVision Studio and our MCP server so far this year. And that's before counting community PRs and the small tasks that never make it to the board. It was a great reminder of the dedicated team we have here and the pace we're able to ship at.
So, here are the highlights from what we announced.
ViroReact
visionOS support - We've been talking about this one for a while and we're finally shipping it. If you're building with ViroReact, your apps can now run on visionOS as soon as you update to 3.0.0.
Here's a quick demo of an app I built for Quest a couple of months ago, updated to 3.0.0 and running on an Apple Vision Pro. Same codebase, new platform.
Meta Quest
Apple Vision Pro
Web AR - ViroReact projects can now run in the browser too. Our goal is to be truly device agnostic, and that means no platform gets left behind. Web AR opens up a whole class of experiences where you want zero friction: no install, no app store, just a link. Someone taps a URL and they're straight into your AR experience. Native rendering still gives you the best performance for full production apps, and now you can pair it with instant browser-based delivery from the same codebase whenever reach matters most.
A new VPS - We've been hard at work building our own Visual Positioning System (VPS) to power features like Geospatial Anchors and Cloud Anchors. We've been laying the groundwork for this over the last few months, and in 3.0.0 we're making the full switch to our new VPS, with more advancements coming over the next few months.
Co-location - As well as supporting Cloud Anchors for shared user experiences, we're now rolling out co-location for real-time multi-user experiences. Supported across headsets and phones, you'll be able to build truly multiplayer experiences, also powered by our new VPS.
Studio
Shareable Scene Links - Thanks to ViroReact's Web AR support, you can now publish your Studio scenes and share them with just a URL. Anyone who opens the link gets your scene as an AR experience right in their browser.
8th Wall Migration Tool - We're adding a new project import feature that lets you bring your existing 8th Wall projects into Studio. Once imported, you can keep building on them in Studio, publish them to your app via the StudioSceneNavigator, or share them with the new Scene Links.
50+ rendering improvements - Our team has made over 50 improvements to the StudioSceneNavigator component to boost rendering performance and output, so your Studio scenes will render better than ever.
See the new 8th Wall migration and Scene Links features in action:
MCP Server
8th Wall to ViroReact conversion - Convert an 8th Wall project into a ViroReact project without leaving your IDE: the code-first route to migration.
Extra intelligence - The MCP server now better understands natural language and has its own reasoning, so coding agents get more accurate answers to their queries.
You can catch up on other recent MCP updates here:
Release
At the time of publishing, our 8th Wall migration tools across Studio and the MCP server are live and available to all users. All other announced updates will roll out over the next week, and we'll announce each one as it lands. If you want to be the first to know when everything is available, be sure to sign up to our newsletter.
Upcoming Events
Don't miss our upcoming events. We've got an in-person meetup in San Francisco next week, on 15 September. Towards the end of the month we'll also be running a virtual online hackathon with our friends at Expo, with details for the in-person follow-up events on our website.