Boz to the Future Episode 15: The Future of Mixed Reality Development with Guest Thomas Van Bouwel

Welcome back for another episode of Boz to the Future, a podcast from Reality Labs. 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, Bosworth 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.

They looked back at Dead and Buried Arena, a demo from Connect 2018 that gave people an early glimpse at the promise of MR and co-located multiplayer experiences. And while that demo relied on the incorporation of design elements on the ceiling, floor, and throughout the space, mainstream MR headsets like Quest 3 are able to map your space as-is.

One day, MR could transform industries for the better. As Van Bouwel noted, we’ve already seen an improvement in people’s ability to provide more meaningful feedback on architectural designs when they’re able to walk through a virtual representation of the space.

You can tune in to Boz to the Future on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. We’ll see you soon for a new episode.

You can follow Bosworth on Instagram, Threads, and Twitter/X @boztank. You can also follow Van Bouwel on Twitter/X @tovanbo.