XR / Metaverse Development

Development roles in Extended Reality (XR) span augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality. Roles in this area reflect a market that has gone beyond early hype and speculation and is now working with a more focused application in sectors such as healthcare, entertainment and industrial production. Knowing how to position your specific experience around specific use cases and platforms is likely to be more useful than pitching yourself as a broad XR generalist.

Most roles will require proficiency in either Unity or Unreal Engine, if not both. WebXR development is a growing area for organisations wishing to deliver browser-based immersive experiences without users needing dedicated hardware, but device specific experience is highly relevant. HoloLens, Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, and Magic Leap each have their own development contexts, so familiarity with specific platforms is often directly relevant to particular opportunities.

Enterprise XR roles require an understanding of how to integrate XR into existing enterprise systems and workflows, as well as being able to make a credible business case for why they should invest in immersive technologies for things like training simulations, remote assistance and industrial visualisation. Consumer and entertainment roles, however, are often closer to game development in terms of the skill profile they require, and have more emphasis on performance optimisation, 3D asset pipelines, and real-time interaction design.