Alex's Unreal 2025

In this season-and-year-end wrap-up, Alex Coulomb covers what shipped (and what’s coming) across Unreal Engine, including UE 5.6/5.7 direction, OpenXR, and where VR/XR performance features are trending. He also recaps why the show went quiet and what Agile Lens has been building across VR, mixed reality, live performance, and community work—including Unreal NYC growth and how to get involved as a speaker/organizer.

A major segment focuses on the final chapter of **A Christmas Carol (VR)**: why it’s being retired, what was learned, and how the team captured full-show “replays” with plans to loop recordings starting Christmas Eve. The episode then rounds out with highlights from workshops and travel, Halcyon/Galactic Starcruiser preservation work, the emerging “Stage Presence” toolkit, SIGGRAPH spatial storytelling, FMX 2026 planning, and Apple Vision Pro + Unreal updates (including Polyarc’s Glass Breakers and a VisionOS-focused engine fork).


Links:

Tickets for the FINAL live shows of A Christmas Carol VR this weekend: https://xmascarolvr.com
Unreal Fest and XR Bootcamp Talks:    • I Wish I Learned This Sooner! - Part 2 | U...  
Unreal NYC Talks:    • Unreal NYC - ICRAVE, ZERO DENSITY, AGILE L...  
Unreal NYC Discord:   / discord  
Unreal NYC Community: https://communities.unrealengine.com/...
Unreal Academy: https://academy.unrealengine.com/
Unreal Galaxy XR Template: https://github.com/agilelens/AndroidX...
Star Wars Halcyon VR Archive: https://github.com/agilelens/halcyonvr
SIGGRAPH Paper "Seeing Yourself on Stage": https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/372124...
New Agile Lens website: https://www.agilelens.com
Worlds in Play: worldsinplay.com
Your Mind Girls Live Mixed Reality Theatre: https://www.hopehutman.com/ymg-2025
Glassbreakers: https://www.glassbreakersgame.com/
Unreal Fest Chicago 2026 Submission Form: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ne...
FMX 2026: https://fmx.de/en/program/boards/prog...
MIT Reality Hack 2026: https://www.realityhackatmit.com/