Godot Engine received a new grant from Reality Labs, the XR division of Meta

The developers of the free Godot engine have received a new grant for an undisclosed amount from Reality Labs. The funds will be used to develop additional features to support AR and VR games.At the same time, the authors of Godot Engine shared their plans for the development of the XR direction for 2022:

• approximately half of the grant will go to further development and support of the OpenXR plugin, as well as the introduction of functions related to Meta XR initiatives into the engine (the company told more about them during the Facebook rebranding);The rest of the funds will be spent on adapting the Godot editor for XR applications and devices, including the Meta Quest virtual reality helmet (formerly Oculus).
• The developers separately stressed that all new AR and VR functions will be completely free.

They will either be embedded directly into the editor, or available as separate plugins.

For the first time, Reality Labs issued a grant to Godot Engine in December last year. During this time, the developers have rewritten most of the XR functionality, added OpenXR support for Godot 3 and adapted the engine to work with virtual reality helmets.

Reality Labs is an XR division of Meta. Previously, it included three separate teams (Oculus, Spark and Portal), and in August last year they were merged into one structure. Now Reality Labs is also responsible for the development of the future Meta-universe.