2023 Immersive Industry Recap: Meta Quest 3, Apple Vision Pro, and a Year of Innovation and Collaboration

2023 was a transformative year that saw ‘spatial’ emerge as our word du jour; the groundbreaking launch of UEFN; and the long-awaited entry of Apple into the immersive industry. So here’s a quick recap of all the significant moments from the last year, as well as some things we’re proud of.

Meta Quest 3 was Released

The unveiling and launch of the Meta Quest 3 marked a significant milestone in bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds, being the world's first mass-market mixed reality headset. The new headset boasted a slimmer profile, louder audio, and improved resolution to its predecessor, with the added feature of full-color Passthrough enabling cross-reality experiences. We had the honor of working with the Meta team on an open-sourced project that shows developers the full capabilities of the MR SDK (if you are very observant you may have already spotted a sneak peek at Connect this year!) so watch this space – we can’t wait to share it with you.

Apple Vision Pro was Announced

Announced at WWDC 2023, Apple’s entry into the immersive industry went far beyond just another addition to the existing landscape. The company’s first ‘spatial computing device’, called the ‘Vision Pro’, promised everything you’d expect from the world’s biggest tech company: smooth user experience, ecosystem integration, and exceptional quality.

Apple's investment in this space holds the promise of driving widespread adoption, shaping the trajectory of immersive experiences, and igniting a wave of innovation within the XR domain. The momentum is only going to grow when the headset becomes available – Apple’s website says ‘early 2024’ – not long now!

Fortnite Continued to Dominate Headlines

Towards the back end of this year, Fortnite has been transporting users back to the ‘good ‘ol days’ of 2018, and bringing back the ‘OG’ map and events, with each update of the game bringing a different phase of Battle Royales past. Powered by nostalgia, the decision was made to get players back into the game, before launching a trio of new experiences extending beyond the classic Battle Royale. During the Big Bang event at the start of December which featured a virtual concert from Eminem, Fortnite broke records with an incredible 11.6 million concurrent users. The platform continues to innovate and find new ways to revive dormant players and bring in new ones. With the recent partnerships with toy giant LEGO and rap legend Eminem, as well as the announcement of Fortnite Festival, the momentum is only going to continue.

Earlier this year the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) was released, enabling developers to design and publish games directly in Fortnite. UEFN provides access to many of Unreal Engine 5’s powerful tools and workflows to create Fortnite islands, including custom asset import, modeling, materials and VFX, Sequencer and Control Rig, and more. It’s a game changer for creators, as they can create AAA-quality games within Fortnite, without being limited to the framework or aesthetic of a traditional Fortnite design.

Sony Immersive Music Studios reached out to us to collaborate on an experience that showcases the power of UEFN, so we developed a stunning 'music-first' arena battle experience – the first ever Fortnite Creative Island with licensed music. You can play CAPTURE THE MUSIC: NITEWAVE using island code: 0400-8367-8548, and read more about the project here.

Working Together to Accelerate the Next Web

This past year has seen companies coming together to accelerate the creation of the next spatial web and ensure they lay the right foundations for it.

April 2023 saw the incorporation of the Metaverse Standards Forum, a non-profit, member-funded consortium of standards-related organizations, companies, and institutions that are cooperating to foster interoperability for an open and inclusive metaverse. The Forum generates domain and technical reports, use case and requirements recommendations, pilots, testbeds and plugfests, open source tooling, best practices and guidelines, and other data, insights, and visibility to enable standards organizations to accelerate the development and evolution of standards that will be essential to building the metaverse. Over 2500 organizations have now joined the forum, and more are joining every day!

Leading the way in this space is Cesium, a company that provides 3D geospatial software components, facilitating the creation of open standards and knowledge needed to drive the internet's progression from 2D to fully immersive 3D. Cesium created 3D Tiles, an OGC Community Standard for streaming massive 3D geospatial datasets, to be the spatial index for the metaverse. In 2023, the company announced "Cesium for Omniverse," an extension that enables 3D geospatial capability for NVIDIA Omniverse, a real-time 3D graphics collaboration development platform. Cesium for Omniverse is Cesium's fifth runtime engine, joining open-source CesiumJS, and the open source plugins Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for O3DE.

In July, we open-sourced our Connected Spaces Platform (CSP). We’ve been working on this technology for over five years, at times with more than 60 people, and have gone through rounds of testing on public experiences and private betas with developers. The entire Magnopus team was so proud to finally release their hard work to the public.

CSP facilitates the development of interoperable spatial applications – meaning the same experience can be accessible across different devices, through different technologies, and even across physical and digital spaces. Currently, the user experience and standards for the spatial internet are being actively developed by just a handful of the world’s largest tech companies. Even though they’re making great progress in demonstrating what the future holds, developer communities believe that fostering this kind of significant change to the baseline experience requires accessibility and interoperability. We are supporting the vision of organizations like the Metaverse Standards Forum, and W3C by open-sourcing the Connected Spaces technologies we’ve been using.

By making this available under a royalty-free permissive free software license, we’re helping lay the foundations for a more diverse spatial internet that communities can build on together. We hope that other people on a journey similar to us can benefit from the work we’ve done to facilitate the interoperability of spaces connected across physical and digital worlds. We know we keep telling you to ‘watch this space’, but we really are hard at work building some big things on top of the Connected Spaces Platform, and we will be able to share them with you in the New Year - promise!

Magnopus Celebrated Turning 10

2023 was the 10th anniversary of Magnopus, and at such a milestone we can’t help but look back and appreciate the last decade and the 100s of projects we’ve shipped (most of which we aren’t allowed to talk about!). From amplifying important stories with an augmented reality app for the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles to taking over 4 million people to space (virtually!), we’ve worked with some truly brilliant teams over the years. Our own team has grown across two continents, and we continue to have some of the best and brightest minds in the industry fighting the good fight with us. Thank you to everyone who has been on this incredible journey with us.