Niantic’s 8th Wall WebXR AR engine now supports Apple Vision Pro.
8th Wall is a web-based AR engine, which has a fully in-browser editor and offers cloud hosting for built projects. Niantic is the company behind smartphone AR games like Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now.
Last month we reported on three 8th Wall demos that support crossplay between smartphones and Quest 3, but noted that none of the demos worked on Apple Vision Pro.
Niantic has now added support for Vision Pro in 8th Wall, but there’s a major catch.
Apple Vision Pro supports WebXR yes, through enabling an advanced Safari flag, but it does not support the WebXR Augmented Reality module. That means web apps can show fully immersive VR content on Vision Pro, but can’t display on top of passthrough for AR.
To work around this, 8th Wall makes it easy for developers to add a virtual environment as the background for their otherwise-AR apps. These apps will run in AR mode on mobile and Meta Quest, and in VR on Vision Pro.
This is of course somewhat ironic, given the primary focus of Vision Pro is AR and the primary focus of Quest has traditionally been VR.
Vision Pro owners can try out Niantic’s Basketball Arcade game for an example of an 8th Wall experience that supports the headset.
