ViroReact 3.1.0: Your App Now Understands the Room It's In

Two months ago, ViroReact 3.0.0 took one codebase to five platforms. 3.1.0 is about something different: making the apps you build actually understand the world around them.

Here's what's new, and why it matters.

Advanced VPS: your app knows exactly where it is

This is the big one.

Walk a room with your phone for a minute. Advanced VPS turns that into a living map of the space: a mesh, a 3D model, a Gaussian splat, and a list of every object it found, from the fridge to the fire extinguisher. Your app then localises against that map continuously, so content stays exactly where you put it, for every user, every session.

No LiDAR needed. No GPS needed either: point your phone and it works out which room you're in. And because it can match on our servers as well as on the device, it keeps working days later, in different light, even at night.

Indoor navigation, property scans, training that's locked to real equipment, persistent shared AR worlds. This is what opens them up.

Read the full Advanced VPS announcement

Meta Quest: see your own hands

Reach out in passthrough and your real hands now appear in front of virtual objects, instead of disappearing behind them. It's a small thing that makes mixed reality feel dramatically more real, and it's one prop to turn on.

Content you place in a room now stays put when someone recentres their headset, and Editor scenes on Quest place themselves on your real tables and floors using the room you set up in Space Setup.

Shipping to the Horizon Store, minus the rejections

If you've ever had a Quest build bounced by store review over a missing manifest flag or a permission you didn't know you were declaring, this one's for you. Our Expo plugin now handles Meta's packaging rules for you, and apps pause properly when the system menu opens, as Meta requires.

The Editor's in-headset menus also got a redesign. They now look and feel like native Horizon OS panels, appear where you're looking, and highlight whatever you point at.

3D models that look the way they should

Bring in a model from Blender or Sketchfab and it should look like it did in Blender or Sketchfab. 3.1 gets a lot closer:

• Glowing materials actually glow
• Transparent bits stop punching holes in the scenery behind them
• Animated characters move properly, and stop losing their eyes when the camera gets close (really)
• Metals look like metal
• Vision Pro now renders full PBR materials, so models look as good on visionOS as everywhere else

Your users, your sign-in

Building an app with its own accounts? You can now scan, localise and share rooms on behalf of each signed-in user, without ever putting a secret key on the device. Each user gets their own locations and scans, and it all works with co-location too.

Little things that make a big difference

• iOS Simulator support. Run your AR app in the Simulator on Apple Silicon. Yes, finally.
• Smarter scanning. Your users get live tips while they scan ("slow down", "you're too close to the wall"), so first scans come out right.
• A world mesh that remembers. The scanned mesh now builds up as you move, covering the whole room instead of just what's in view.
• Painless prebuilds. Running expo prebuild twice no longer leaves your native projects in a mess.
• Over 90 fixes across iOS, Android, Quest, visionOS and the web.

Upgrade today

npm install @reactvision/react-viro@3.1.1
npx expo prebuild --clean

Then rebuild your native app. A few changes might nudge your layout or text position, so give your app a quick look after upgrading. Everything you need to know, every API and every fix, is in the full changelog.

Or let your coding agent do it: point it at the ViroReact MCP server and ask it what changed since your version.

Come and talk to us

Bring your questions to our next Office Hours on 9 December, and tell us what you're building on Discord.