2024 Mixed Reality Report

An in depth look at Games and Non-Games on the Meta Store

Over the last year, I have created a list of 400+ MR Apps and I thought it was time to look at how the ecosystem has evolved, what types of content have been published on the store and what users are enjoying in their headsets.

The report is structured as follows:

• An intro to explain how the list was built and what data were collected

• A comparison of Gaming Vs. Non-Gaming Apps

• A deeper breakdown of the various categories within the Gaming and Non-Gaming apps highlighting some of the apps I think you should check out

• Some personal considerations and what to expect next

The list is a living resource in Notion that I update regularly. If you want to get full access you should subscribe to the XR AI Spotlight newsletter and you will get it directly in your mailbox along with weekly in-depth interviews with founders and makers shaping the future of XR and AI.

How I Built the List?

Let me start by saying that this represents a very specific portion of the content and experiences available to users. There are several reasons for that:

• It includes ONLY apps that have some MR component to them (an example is Asgard’s Wrath 2 which is fundamentally a VR game bur has an MR mode and consequently made it into the list)

• It includes only a small portion of apps that are not on the Meta store and just a handful for VisionPro (I plan to add a section with WebXR apps).

• Since the research and scraping are done manually I have certainly missed something. If you know an MR app missing please do not hesitate to reach out.

This means that from the data we cannot make conclusions on the general XR market and it is more meaningful to look at how data compare within this group (e.g. how many games Vs non-games apps have implemented MR? How does the average rating compare? Etc). If you have quantitative data on the overall store please reach out as this would really help to add an extra dimension to this report.

For each entry in the list I have added the following 10 parameters:

• Name of the app

• A link where you can get it

• If the app is free or paid

• The app category (more on it below)

• The platform on which it is available (Quest, VisionPro, and webXR coming soon)

• A short description taken from the product page

• A custom tag used to highlight specific features (at the moment used to tag apps that have some AI implementation or Local MR co-op)

• The user rating

• The number of reviews

• The thumbnail of the product trailer

Assigning the category was undoubtedly the hardest part, as I had to make tough distinctions between games or non-games, fitness or sports and music or learning. Ultimately, I am sure some people might disagree with some of my decisions, but the final category was assigned based on my own opinion of whether an app was leaning “more” on one side or the other.

Gaming Vs Non-Gaming Apps

The list at the time of writing this report contains 382 apps. This includes apps that have been built from the ground up with MR in mind like recent releases such as Wall Town Wonders, Party Versus or Squingle or experiences that were originally released as VR-only experiences and that added an MR mode like Puzzling Places or ShapesXR. Based on some estimates of the total number of apps available on the store that I got from Alt Lab VR (estimated at 3891) we can say that only 10% of the apps on the store have implemented some form of MR.

Half of the apps in the list are paid while the rest are free. This is comparable with the ratio I could gather from AltLabVR where 47% of the apps are free.

When we look more in-depth into gaming Vs non-gaming apps we start seeing some interesting differences.

There is an almost 50/50 split between games and non-gaming apps that have implemented MR. I don’t have data to back this statement up, but I think this is an initial difference we can see from the overall store where games are the main content category. Yet gaming seems to remain the most popular with an overall higher number of ratings and average ratings. It has to be noted that especially for the “number of ratings” the values are very polarised and a small number of apps are responsible for the majority of the ratings.

For games, the top 10 most rated apps are responsible for 64 % of the number of ratings (98K of the total 152K). You can easily build this filter in the Notion list but the top 5 are Eleven Table Tennis, DigiGods (a free game nobody is talking about with over 11K ratings), The Thrill of the Fight, Big Ballers VR and Vegas Infinite at the first place with a staggering 28 K ratings. It is fair to assume that for none of these apps MR has been the main growth driver and for some like Big Ballers or DigiGods the MR is more of a thick mark than a valuable feature for users.

For non-games, the top 10 apps are responsible for 74% of the ratings (38K of the total 51K). The top 5 is dominated by Fitness and Wellness apps with TRIPP, LES MILLS BODYCOMBAT and FitXR. As you can see below the rest are scattered with very few apps crossing the 100 reviews (123 at the moment of writing this report).

I was also trying to get a feeling of the “quality” of the apps available. Evaluating that at scale is quite tricky but I thought that relying on the number of reviews could be an interesting indicator. I decided to set an arbitrary threshold and count how many apps have less than 10 reviews and it turns out that for games 83% have more than 10 reviews while for non-games only 52%. Another index for “quality” is of course the user ratings. The average doesn’t tell us much with an average of 4.33 Vs 4.12 for gaming Vs. non-gaming app respectively. On the other hand, when we look at the distribution it is clear that gaming apps peak at a solid rating between 4.5 and 4.75.

For Non-gaming the picture is much more scattered (please note that I decided to remove from this analysis the apps that had less than 10 ratings because I felt they would add unwanted noise with apps that were rated a 5 by only one user).

Breakdown per Category and My Highlights

For Gaming, I grouped the apps into the following 7 categories: Strategy, Sport, Action, Adventure, Music, Puzzle and Other.

For Non-Gaming, I used the following 6 categories: Fitness & Wellness, Productivity, Creativity, Music, Travel and Learning.

Assigning a category to each app was not straightforward, especially for some experiences that were at the edge between Fitness and Sport, or Music and Learning. Ultimately I estimated toward which “side” each app was mostly leaning towards. The top three categories for games are Action, Puzzle and Sport.

I was not surprised to see many action games since it is one of the most popular genres but was also glad to see so many puzzles since I believe this is a type of experience that works extremely well in MR. Strategy on the other hand was slightly lagging behind but I am sure that after checking many would argue that some games I categorized as “strategy” could fall in the “puzzle” bucket. I encourage you to get the list and do your filtering and searching but while looking at some of the top-rated apps I found some hidden gems that I don’t think got the recognition they deserve. Here are 5:

• Rescue the holes: A simple dexterity game that requires physical coordination to rescue holes across premade tracks OR one you can build yourself

• Living Room: when Quest 3S was announced many were amazed by footage from Wall Town Wonders or Starship Home but based on the stellar reviews (4.9 with 155 ratings) Living Room seems to be the clear strategy winner

• Cues: A mesmerizing game mixing music with the physical environment magically

• Gadgeteer: There are a few apps that let you build your rube goldberg-like machine. This is simply my favourite and recently added MR.

• Game Night: Shared spatial anchors at its best let you play simple games with no controllers. Perfect for everyone.

Let’s now move to non-gaming apps. The top category is productivity but that is quite obvious for a reason I am going to share shortly. After that, we have Fitness & Wellness, followed by creativity, learning, music and travel.

I think MR is the perfect addition to any Fitness experience. Being aware of your surroundings is extremely important during activities that require a lot of movement. I was personally terrified when playing Thrill of the Fight in VR but being in MR made it a much more “relaxing” experience, and I can give my 100% without being constantly afraid of smashing my controller (and bones) against a wall. On the other hand, I am not a big fan of those Beat Saber-like apps where you get to punch or slice stuff that now comes through an MR portal. FitXR in that regard did a much better job since it has a mode that fully takes advantage of the user's physical space and is without surprise one of the top-rated fitness apps on the store (for many other reasons as well).

Creativity holds a special place in my heart and it is great to see this category well represented among the MR apps. Here are some of the one you should try out:

• Gesture VR: is a drawing app that has one of the best drawing simulations I have experienced

• Blockworks: is a Lego-like playground with an endless supply of blocks that let’s you assemble whatever you want with fully supported hand-tracking

• Pencil is an App that teaches you to draw with real pencil and paper and has a variety of lessons of increase complexity and depth.

• Shapelab Lite is the standalone version of the sculpting app Shapelab. It looks super powerful and comparable to Adobe Medium but on Quest!

• ShapesXR: is a collaborative design tool that allows to create interactive prototypes of anything: from XR apps to user experiences in the real world.

I also want to take a minute to say that creativity in XR can take many forms and that there are many other experiences that I categorized as “games” that have creative/building elements to them. Examples are Track Craft, Coaster Mania, Patch Worlds and more. All these apps allow users to assemble their own “creations” often using a pre-made set of building blocks and someone could easily qualify them as creative apps.

Let’s now talk about productivity. The main reason why this is the most represented category is because the definition is rather loose. This group could have been split into at least 4 more subcategories (virtual screens, media players, utility and volumetric experiences) but I decided against it because I didn't want too much segmentation. In a nutshell, I think these are the apps you should absolutely check:

• Virtual Desktop: the most robust solution to stream your PC to a Quest and play games, watch movies or just be productive.

• Fluid: Cloud multi-monitor setup that supports flawless keyboard and mouse integration and allows you to be productive everywhere. Don’t miss it because it is right now the highest-rated multi-screen app on the Meta store with 4.7 rating and over 900 reviews. Check out also my interview with the founder John Dagdelen here.

• SoapBox: Volumetric captures of performing artists you can view in your living room. It's not the best quality overall (you should check Voluverse for that) but it is all wrapped in the best experience I could find.

• SeeSignal: Find weak Wifi spots in your house using a digital representation in MR

• Teledomica: Furnish your physical space using the assets provided or the ones you can import via the web dashboard.

One last thing that I wanted to point out was the “Tag” field. Currently, there are 2 tags: AI and Co-Located. AI is a tag used to highlight the apps that have either an AI component (like agents or some sort of GenAI feature) OR in which some of the content (like 3D models, animations or other) was created with AI. At the moment there are 15 apps in the list. A good portion of these apps are experimenting with different degrees of success with AI agents. Sadly for many on the list the quality of the final experience is very often suboptimal with unresponsive or utterly broken apps. Only a few stand out and manage to deliver on their promise of AI agent interaction:

• Brink Traveler: It has not an MR component BUT manages to deliver one of the best AI integrations I have seen so far. Check out my interview with the founder Akin Bilgic.

• SIMTRYX It is not available to the general public but is one of the best conversations I had with an avatar powered by AI in MR.

• VirtualSpeech allows users to refine their soft skills by talking to AI avatars in a variety of predetermined scenarios.

I am going to keep collecting and categorizing these apps in the upcoming months and write a full article since there is really too much to cover and would fall outside the scope of this conversation.

The “Co-Located” tag instead is used for apps that have shared spatial anchors and allow multiple users to experience the app in the same physical space.

Despite the low number I see huge potential in shared spatial experiences and I believe is an important part of the experience that we need to figure out if we want to deploy digital content outdoors and have a meaningful implementation of AR glasses as part of our lives.

Conclusion and What’s Next

Despite the release of the first mainstream MR device in 2022 with the Meta Quest Pro, developers have been hesitant to adopt this new form of content. There are 4 reasons for that in my opinion:

• Many apps were born with “full immersion” in mind and adding a portal into the real world just doesn’t make much sense or add value to the user experience.

• The MR user base is still quite small. On Quest Pro the quality of the passthrough was still barely usable, VisionPro is certainly not a mainstream device and an affordable good quality MR experience became available only recently with the release of Quest 3S

• The “tools” to build such MR experiences are still in full development and SDKs for room mapping, scene understanding and more are getting better but still suffer bugs and issues that lead to frustrations and delays.

• Building truly immersive MR games is very hard. Titles like Laser Dance promise an exciting room scale MR experience but have been postponed several times. I also had the chance to interview Lucas Rizzotto, the “mad scientist” behind Pillow and he shares more about the challenges of building for MR.

When we also look at the popularity of the various apps we can see how only recently with the release of Quest 3S the number of “native” MR releases has increased. Despite action/shooting games being the most popular, I think puzzle and strategy experiences are the ones with the most potential and I hope to see more titles taking advantage of the physical space.

Non-gaming apps are still finding their way. As previously mentioned, Fitness apps are probably the ones that can benefit from MR the most. The other where I have seen some solid and meaningful MR implementation are experiences that revolve around multi-screen productivity… and that is a little disappointing. A lot of the non-gaming MR apps on the store are more tech demos than fully fledged products. I was hoping and expecting to see more daring and innovative experiences and the indefinite postponement of the augments announced by Meta and the lack of camera access are not good signs.

In the upcoming months I will keep adding apps to the list (including a webxr category), and also monitor how the # of reviews and ratings change in time to understand what type of content resonates with users and if we will see non-gaming experiences also get the spotlight I believe they deserve.

I hope you enjoyed this write-up and remember to subscribe to the XR AI Spotlight newsletter to get the full list AND receive weekly interviews with some of the top founders and creatives shaping the future of XR and AI.