Microsoft is bringing ‘Windows Volumetric Apps’ to Meta Quest headsets

You can already beam your flat Windows desktop and its VR games onto your Meta Quest headset — but what if Windows could send HoloLens-like 3D apps and digital objects to the headset, too?

At Build, Microsoft has just announced “Windows Volumetric Apps on Meta Quest,” a way to “extend Windows apps into 3D space.”

Details are slim, but the company showed off a digital exploded 3D view of an Xbox controller from the perspective of a Meta Quest 3 headset, a digital object you could manipulate with your hands — and says it took its software partner Creo a single day to bring that interactive visualization to Quest.

Microsoft says devs can sign up for the developer preview today, which’ll give you access to an unnamed “volumetric API.” The form you’ll fill out makes this sound like early days:

Microsoft is looking for developers that produce or provide plug-ins for 3D Windows desktop applications or customers that work with 3D applications on Windows desktop applications who are interested in extending those applications into 3D content with mixed reality.

It’s only been a few months since Microsoft ditched its previous Windows Mixed Reality initiative, which relied on an array of Windows PC partners to build wired headsets that users would plug directly into a PC. In April, Microsoft partnered with Meta on a limited-run Xbox-themed version of the Meta Quest, and it introduced Office apps in Quest VR and Xbox Cloud Gaming in Quest VR last December.

Meanwhile, other PC makers have begun licensing Meta’s Quest operating system for their own upcoming headsets. A more direct partnership between LG and Meta is reportedly on the rocks.