JIAN XR

Most video platforms begin with videos. JIAN begins with a person.

JIAN XR is a people-first immersive platform built for spatial computing. When you open JIAN, you do not arrive at a wall of thumbnails. You begin in passthrough and encounter a real person. You can hear their story, discover experiences connected to their life and work, and open a Portal to step into immersive VR180 worlds.

The idea grew from Within Reach, our ongoing VR180 portrait project. While filming people at conversational distance, we began asking a different product question: what if the basic unit of an immersive platform was not a video or channel, but a person? That idea became the foundation of JIAN.

Today, JIAN connects three layers of experience: Encounter → Story → Experience. A person becomes the starting point. Their story helps you understand who they are. Immersive experiences then let you go further — into a tea room, a workshop, a performance, a landscape, or another part of their everyday life.

The Quest application combines passthrough mixed reality with high-quality VR180 playback. Users can browse people and experiences, open spatial Portals, stream immersive video at up to 8K 60p, use subtitles and seeking, and follow people or save experiences they want to return to. JIAN supports hand tracking and Touch controllers.

We built the Quest client in Unity 6 with C#, OpenXR, Meta OpenXR, XR Hands, URP, and Vulkan. Behind the headset experience is a production platform spanning Catalog and playback APIs, Account and device activation, streaming delivery, Creator and editorial CMS workflows, media processing, and client analytics. JIAN XR is publicly available on the Meta Horizon Store.

One challenge was making high-resolution immersive video feel like part of a spatial encounter. We balanced stereoscopic Portal presentation, passthrough, streaming reliability, Quest hardware decoding, subtitles, and seeking while keeping the interface secondary to the person. We also had to keep Person as the primary content object throughout the client, Catalog, CMS, and Creator workflow.

Our biggest lesson has been that immersive media becomes more meaningful when interface recedes and human presence comes forward. The strongest moments can be as simple as a person appearing at conversational distance and inviting you into their world.

We will continue expanding the people and experiences available on JIAN, refining natural hand interaction and Presence Portal design, and opening the Creator workflow to more immersive storytellers.

JIAN / 见 means to see, to meet, and to encounter.

Every encounter opens a new world.

Built With

• c#
• fastify
• hevc
• node.js
• openxr
• passthrough
• postgresql
• render
• typescript
• unity
• vr180
• vulkan