xwei.me
Stylized real-time render of San Francisco from above, looking north across the bay to the Golden Gate and Bay bridges

Xiang Wei

I build real-time game engines, XR runtimes and APIs, and the infrastructure that empowers spatial AI agents.

Rendered by my SF Bay Area digital twin, C++ and Vulkan.

Senior Staff Software Engineer at Meta. I build and maintain the developer interface of Meta's XR platform: the native runtime-to-engine plugins, the OpenXR integration, the Meta XR Simulator, and the AI-agent tooling shipped in the Meta XR SDK for Unity and Unreal Engines. Before Meta, nearly two decades at Ubisoft building in-house game engines that shipped more than ten AAA titles, going back to the original PlayStation.

28 years shipping engines and runtimes Spatial AI agents and XR environment simulation Lead, Agentic AI Task Subgroup, Khronos OpenXR

Selected work

Diagram of the Meta XR Operator build, test, verify loop and the agent, MCP proxy, runtime stack
Diagrams from the Meta developer blog.

Meta XR Operator

Creator and lead, 2025 to present

The XR industry's first AI-agent interface, built on OpenXR. A cross-platform C++ API layer exposes spatial state as Model Context Protocol tools, with an MCP server and proxy, engine integration, and an agentic build-test-verify loop on top.

An agent can play a real, unmodified open-source VR action game the way a person does: it explores the live app, writes a skill, then compiles a player script that runs the observe-act loop at 23 Hz with 1 to 16 ms per call.

Watch the agent play Meta developer blog Agent-written skill on GitHub
Meta XR Simulator title image showing developers testing mixed reality apps on PC and Mac
Title image from the Meta developer blog.

Meta XR Simulator

Architect and creator, 2022 to 2024

A desktop OpenXR runtime, built from scratch, that simulates physical headsets and controllers, plus a synthetic environment server that simulates physical rooms, so developers build and test mixed reality apps without hardware.

It brought OpenXR to macOS as the first runtime on the platform. I convinced the OpenXR Working Group to extend the spec for macOS and built the Metal to Vulkan interop that made it possible.

Meta developer blog Meta Connect session Download
Aerial render of downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge from the digital twin
Personal project, unrelated to my work at Meta.

SF Bay Area digital twin

Personal project, 2026

A stylized real-time twin of an 80 km square built from open data in C++ and Vulkan: 1 m lidar terrain, 424,787 extruded buildings, 41 parametric landmarks, and a globe-to-surface camera. A simulation core replays 24 hours of eight real-world feeds, from highway flow to flights and weather, at 1x to 2000x.

AI agents wrote and validated all of the roughly 235,000 lines. I built the orchestration: golden-image checks, an MCP server that drives the live app, and a reviewer agent that acts as an independent critic.

Clips and write-up

Timeline

2017 to nowMeta / Oculus VR, Burlingame

XR runtimes, engines, simulators, and agents

Senior Staff Software Engineer since 2023. Tech Lead Manager, XR Developer Architecture, 2018 to 2023.

Core maintainer of the native plugin bridging the Meta VR runtime to Unity and Unreal, the layer every app on the platform depends on. Led the migration of the Meta XR SDKs from the proprietary API to OpenXR. Created the Meta XR Simulator, the PC and Mac development simulator above, and the Meta XR Operator, the first AI-agent interface to an OpenXR runtime. Invented Mixed Reality Capture on Quest and co-invented Application SpaceWarp. Built a GenAI text-to-3D asset service for Horizon Worlds.

2014 to 2017Ubisoft San Francisco

Senior Programmer

South Park: The Fractured but Whole. A depth-redistribution pipeline that lets characters made of thousands of layers interact without depth fighting; 1080p/60 on Xbox One and PS4 and 4K/60 on PS4 Pro; build, test, and profiling automation; a mixed reality prototype on HoloLens.

2008 to 2014Ubisoft Montréal

Technical Architect

Rendering and optimization engineer, 2008 to 2010.

Engine architect (Technology Group) across the titles below. Ported Far Cry 4 to PS4 and moved Far Cry 3 and Watch Dogs to Direct3D 11. Designed Black Flag's large-world architecture with dynamic origin shifting. GPU weather simulation of up to a million lit particles, 10x faster volumetric clouds, fur, water, grass, softbody, SDSM, PCSS, HBAO, deferred MSAA/EQAA, and double the PS3 rendering throughput by moving work to SPUs.

1998 to 2008Ubisoft Shanghai

Lead Engineer

Lead Core System Engineer, then Lead Rendering Engineer, then Lead Engineer.

Lead engineer and architect of Tom Clancy's EndWar on Xbox 360: a step-based deterministic engine and peer-to-peer synchronization for an online RTS, growing the engine team from 5 to more than 30. Earlier, PS2 rendering for the Tom Clancy and Brothers in Arms series, and core engine modules for Rayman 2 on the original PlayStation.

OpenXR

Patents

  • US 12,272,012 B2Dynamic mixed reality content in virtual reality (Mixed Reality Capture)
  • US 11,783,533 B2Frame extrapolation with application-generated motion vector and depth (Application SpaceWarp)
  • US application 19/442,481, pendingIntegrating an artificial intelligence agent with an extended reality environment

Talks

Skills

  • C++, Python, C#, GLSL and HLSL
  • Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D, OpenGL and ES
  • OpenXR runtimes, compositors, engine plugins for Unity and Unreal
  • Simulation, digital twins, real-time rendering, GPU optimization
  • AI agents, MCP servers and tools, LLM tool calling, agent-driven validation
  • Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, PlayStation, Xbox

Education and awards

  • Bachelor's degree, Computer Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China
  • ACM-ICPC 1996, 8th in Asia Region
  • Mathematical Contest in Modeling 1997, Meritorious
  • Chinese National Olympiad in Informatics 1993, silver medal
  • Chinese Chemistry Olympiad 1992, silver medal

Indie projects