The new Horizon OS ‘Navigator’ system UI finally rolled out to all Quest headsets, more than a year after Meta began publicly testing it.
Since the release of Oculus Go in 2018, Meta’s standalone VR operating system has seen numerous visual changes, but the general interface architecture remained essentially the same.
You had a floating horizontal menu bar slightly below you, called the Universal Menu, showing the time and your device battery levels on the left, and a combination of shortcuts to pinned and recently launched apps on the right. Almost all operating system interfaces, including core features like the app Library, Quick Settings, and Notifications, opened as regular 2D windows, treated like any other, meaning any regular 2D app would cause these core interfaces to shift around.
Imagine if your phone’s app library, or control center, or the Windows Start Menu, was just another windowed app. That’s how Meta’s XR operating system used to work.
Then, in May last year, Meta started a very slow rollout of a full Horizon OS UI overhaul, called ‘Navigator’, which moves the main system interfaces like Library, Quick Settings, Notifications and Camera into a new large overlay that appears over both immersive and 2D apps.
With Navigator, system interfaces no longer shift around when opening other windows, and it’s far quicker to launch new apps because the library is the default UI panel.
Navigator has gone through a number of refinements since its rough initial version. For example, it originally had a murky gray background with an oval shape that severely obscured your view of what was behind it, which just didn’t look good, and this was replaced by simply dimming the background.
The latest iteration of the Meta Horizon OS Navigator UI.
Navigator also launched with both Apps and Horizon Worlds listed in the central launcher interface, and without a Friends list interface.
In October, Meta added a separate Worlds tab, meaning the App library was no longer polluted with Horizon Worlds. And then earlier this year, following the announcement that Horizon Worlds is moving away from VR, Meta removed the Worlds tab from Navigator entirely.
Meta also got rid of Horizon Feed, the default 2D app that used to launch when you cold-booted your Quest headset, meaning that Quest headsets now boot straight into a grid of your apps, just as you expect a mobile computing device to do.
The 7 tabs of the Horizon OS Navigator, as of June 2026, now stand as:
- You: lets you switch users and set your online status, and also has shortcuts to edit your avatar and profile.
- Notifications
- People: a grid of your friends, linking to their profiles.
- App Library
- Quick Controls: brightness, volume, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Screenshots/Recording, Travel Mode, and other core settings & toggles.
- Show/Hide Windows
- Toggle between Passthrough & VR Home
And in the App Library, you can now reposition the app icons where you want them, and create folders to organize them, just as you can on pretty much any other major consumer operating system.
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Arguably, the biggest remaining flaw of Navigator is that it still doesn’t fully incorporate all system-level features as part of the overlay. In the above bullets, by “shortcuts to” I mean that it opens a regular 2D window straight out of the previous Horizon OS interface paradigm. With all the same issues. It’s somewhat surprising to see Meta roll Navigator out widely before solving this. But it’s still a net improvement compared to what came before.
I’m actively writing on UploadVR again, and this article is one in a series of “catch up” pieces where I report on some of the interesting things that have been happening in the industry in recent months. And yes, VR Download is coming back soon!
This article was originally published on uploadvr.com
