Getting Started with Meta XR Simulator

The Meta XR Simulator is a lightweight Extended Reality (XR) runtime built to speed up XR application development and testing on your development machine. This page provides a brief overview of Meta XR Simulator and basic installation and usage instructions.

The simulator adheres to the same XR API specification as mobile and PC VR runtimes, enabling integration with your engine’s IDE without requiring any modifications. It includes a predefined input mapping schema and a user interface that displays information about how the runtime composites the final view and simulates input.

To activate, open the XR Simulator and click the slider on the top left corner.

This action will set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Khronos\OpenXR\1ActiveRuntime to path to meta_openxr_simulator.json on Windows, and /usr/local/share/openxr/1/active_runtime.json on MacOS.

The Meta XR Simulator will save your current settings and restore them when it’s deactivated. For more details, refer to the OpenXR Loader documentation⁠.

Note: Only one OpenXR runtime can be active at any given time. Activating the Meta XR Simulator will automatically deactivate any other installed OpenXR runtime, including Meta Horizon Link.

To deactivate, open the XR Simulator and turn off the toggle on top left corner. The previous active runtime will be restored.

After you have downloaded the Meta XR Simulator and set it as the activated OpenXR runtime, you can launch the OpenXR application. The OpenXR Loader will load Meta XR Simulator as the runtime, and you should see OpenXR application in Meta XR Simulator Window when XrInstance is created:

You can run hello_xr to verify that the Meta XR Simulator is set up correctly. The About side panel gives details on the Meta XR Simulator version, file path, graphics API, and other useful information: