XR Development with Godot Engine and Meta Quest 3

Curiosity about extended reality led me to explore the full capabilities of Godot Engine for Meta Quest 3, including passthrough rendering and mixed-reality interaction. I studied how the headset’s cameras, sensors, and coordinate systems operate, and how Godot’s XR architecture manages spatial mapping and tracking.

During this exploration, I developed VisualAnchors, a custom plugin that extends Godot with real-world anchoring through QR-code detection and pose estimation. The system uses a native OpenCV backend on Android to identify markers, estimate their 3D poses via IPPE (SOLVEPNP_IPPE_SQUARE), and project them into Godot’s XR space with smoothing filters such as One-Euro and SLERP. It provides a high-level VisualAnchorsManager API that allows developers to bind 3D nodes directly to real-world anchors, creating a seamless bridge between the physical and virtual environments.

This work gave me a deep understanding of how computer vision, geometry, and XR systems can merge into spatial computing. It also taught me the discipline of building cross-platform, performance-oriented tools that enable others to experiment and create.

🔗 VisualAnchors on GitHub

https://github.com/davoddino/visualanchors

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