The Future of Mixed Reality Development: With Guest Thomas Van Bouwel

In today’s episode, our host, Meta CTO and Head of Reality Labs Andrew “Boz” Bosworth is joined by Thomas Van Bouwel, the indie developer behind beloved puzzle game Cubism.

A former architect turned solo XR developer, Van Bouwel has been a pioneer of Meta’s Presence Platform suite of tools—in fact, Cubism was one of first Meta Quest games to integrate Passthrough and hand tracking. Currently, Van Bouwel’s working on a game built for the ground up for mixed reality called Laser Dance.

Together, Boz and Van Bouwel discuss how mixed reality is inspiring creativity among the XR development community. As MR unlocks the ability to blend virtual elements with your physical environment, we find ourselves in an exciting time that mirrors the energy around room-scale VR back in 2017. And there’s a unique opportunity for developers to design and ship MR-native games that interact with your space as opposed to requiring you to move furniture around to create a large enough playspace. Thanks to color Passthrough and our Scene API, there’s more potential for truly room-scale experiences than ever before.

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