Major Developers Are Already Using Quest's Passthrough API

Mar 11, 2025

Meta will host Niantic, Creature, and Resolution to "showcase real-world examples of developers who are already leveraging our latest Passthrough Camera API" at GDC next week.

The revelation comes from a listing for a GDC 2025 Meta Developer Summit called Merge Realities, Multiply Wonder: Expert Guidance on Mixed Reality Development. Here's its description:

The summit listing comes a week after a Meta support page went live describing a "headset camera" permission which "allows an app to access the real-time passthrough camera feed from the front of your headset".

Meta announced the Passthrough API at Connect 2024 back in September, saying that it will "enable all kinds of cutting-edge MR experiences".

The Meta support page that emerged last week gives three examples of how Quest apps could leverage the passthrough view:

Meanwhile, Google confirmed last month that Android XR, its upcoming OS set to debut in Samsung's standalone headset, will let apps access the passthrough camera view at launch.

While headsets like Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro use cameras to let you see the real world, today only the system software gets raw access to these cameras. Third-party developers can use passthrough as a background, sure, but they don't actually get access to it. They instead get higher-level data derived by the system, such as hand and body skeletal coordinates, a 3D mesh of your environment with bounding boxes for furniture, and limited object tracking capabilities. That means they can't run their own computer vision models, which severely limits the augmentation capabilities of these headsets.The exception is that on visionOS 2, Apple is now giving enterprise companies raw access to Vision Pro's passthrough cameras for non-public internal apps, but this requires a special licence from Apple and is restricted to "in a business setting only".