Meta Launches $1M Developer Competition to Stock ‘VR Glasses’ with More Hand-tracked Apps

At Meta’s annual developer conference today, the company announced its next VR Start Developer Competition, this time slated to award a prize pool of $1 million to spark the community to get cracking on Meta VR Glasses-compatible content.

Meta is hoping to appeal to developers of both new and existing projects across entertainment, gaming, and productivity.

Notably, if developers are submitting games, they’ll be considering submissions in genres that work well for seated play, without controllers, such as puzzle, strategy, casual, social, and narrative experiences.

Courtesy Meta

Games must be “fully usable with hands, end-to-end,” Meta says, noting that Touch controller support is welcome, but not required.

“For a small team without a marketing budget, that visibility drives traffic to your Store listing and gives you something concrete to point to when you pitch a new project or recruit collaborators,” Meta says.

This comes ahead of the company’s Meta VR Glasses announced at Connect this week, which does support Quest’s Touch Plus controllers, but doesn’t ship with them, instead putting its onboard hand and eye-tracking as its preferred control scheme.

Photo captured by Road to VR

Those are set to arrive sometime in Spring 2027, priced at $1,300. Check out our hands-on with Meta VR Glasses to learn more.

The competition takes place from today until November 18th, 2026, and is offering up prizes ranging in value from $20,000 to $100,000 for successful submissions. Winners will be announced on or around December 11th, 2026.

Since Meta VR Glasses run the same operating system as Quest, developers can prototype on Quest 3 in addition to using platform simulators like Meta XR Simulator (Unity | Unreal), Meta Spatial Simulator, and Immersive Web Emulator⁠.

Interested developers can join the Start program now to enter for competition.

The post Meta Launches $1M Developer Competition to Stock ‘VR Glasses’ with More Hand-tracked Apps appeared first on Road to VR.

Filed under: Allgemein - @ 24. September 2026 20:35