We’re excited to launch the developer preview of the Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Plugin for Android XR—designed to help Snapdragon Spaces developers bring their Unity projects to the future ecosystem of Android XR devices. This plugin simplifies the migration process, enabling a smooth transition to next-generation XR experiences

What is the Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Plugin?

The Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Plugin for Android XR for Unity streamlines the migration of existing Snapdragon Spaces applications to the Android XR platform. It supports the required Unity 6 upgrade, includes a built-in validation tool to ensure compatibility of project settings and OpenXR features.

Unity 6

The migration from Snapdragon Spaces to Android XR starts with upgrading to Unity 6, AR Foundation 6 and XR Interaction Toolkit 3 which is required. For Android XR it is recommended you use the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) as your render pipeline and Vulkan as your Graphics API.  These features allow you to take advantage of some of the newer graphics features from Unity, which are only supported with Vulkan.

Unity provides a set of resources to facilitate the upgrade process as well as a list of changes in Unity 6 that may affect existing project.

• Upgrade to Unity 6.0
• Upgrading from Built-In Render Pipeline to URP
• What’s new AR Foundation 6
• Configure URP for AR Foundation
• XRI 3.0 Upgrade Guide

Check out the story of How 4 Top Developers Ported Their Apps Over to Android XR with Unity 6.

Compatibility Tool

The Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Plugin helps simplify the transition to Android XR by including the Compatibility Tool, accessible in the project settings.

The Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Tool identifies compatibility issues between project settings, scene contents, enabled OpenXR features and Android XR.

Common Features

Thanks to OpenXR and Unity AR Foundation, migrating your project requires minimal effort. The Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Plugin ensures that all existing OpenXR features from the Snapdragon Spaces SDK remain supported and ready to use on Snapdragon Spaces AndroidXR devices, while enabling a common feature set across both platforms.

The set of OpenXR features in common on Snapdragon Spaces and Android XR includes:

• Session
• Controller Tracking (Device Tracking)
• Head Tracking (Device Tracking)
• Passthrough (Camera)
• Plane Detection
• Hit Testing (Ray Casts)
• Anchors
• Hand Tracking (XR Hands)
• Foveated Rendering
• Composition Layers Support
• Variable Display Refresh Rate
• 2D Image Tracking*
• Meshing*
• Camera Frame Access (Camera)*
• QR Code Tracking*
  

*Included in the commercial release

The Compatibility Tool informs of incompatible features and helps prevent errors caused by enabling features incompatible with Snapdragon Spaces or Android XR before building.

Get Started Today

You don’t need Android XR hardware to begin the transition. With commercially available  VR/MR devices with Snapdragon Spaces, you can start developing and testing today. Projects built on Snapdragon Spaces can be easily migrated to Android XR, allowing you to prepare now and be ready for the next generation of XR headsets when they launch. 

Enterprise developer, Sphere, used the Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Plugin, and the Lenovo VRX with Snapdragon Spaces to seamlessly bring their application to the Android XR platform.

“The Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Plugin made our transition from Snapdragon Spaces to Android XR smooth and efficient. Even without early access to Android XR hardware, we were able to build and validate our app using existing devices with Snapdragon Spaces—ensuring our enterprise customers will be among the first to benefit from Android XR.”– Colin Yao, Sphere CTO

Next Steps

Start building for the future of XR—download the developer preview of the Snapdragon Spaces Compatibility Plugin for Android XR on our website today. With our migration path, it’s the easiest way to bring your existing projects to the next generation of XR devices.