Dec 7, 2021

Presence Platform Spatial Anchors Experimental and Voice SDK Now Available

Oculus VR

At Connect 2021, we introduced Presence Platform—a broad range of machine perception and AI capabilities that allow you to build more realistic mixed reality, interaction, and voice experiences that seamlessly blend virtual content in a user’s physical world.

Today, we’re excited to announce the experimental release of Spatial Anchors, part of the Insight SDK within Presence Platform, and the general availability of Voice SDK which means you can start shipping voice-enabled experiences to your users. Also, Passthrough—a way to build and test mixed reality experiences that blend real and virtual worlds—is now available for Unreal Engine.

Spatial Anchors Experimental

Spatial Anchors are world-locked frames of reference that enable you to place virtual content in a physical space that can be persisted across sessions. This experimental release of Spatial Anchors allows you to create experiences with:

World-Locked Content: Users can place world-locked content that stays in place while the user walks around the room. For example, a user of a Car Design App can place a 3D model of a car in their office and walk around to inspect the design from different angles.

Persistence: Users can persist world-locked content that reappears in future sessions where the user last left it. For example, a user of a Productivity App can place a whiteboard to the side of their desk. When they come back to the app, the whiteboard reappears at the side of their desk without requiring the user to reposition it.

To create these experiences, you’ll be able to take the following actions with Spatial Anchors:

Create Spatial Anchors at specific 6DoF poses

Track the current 6DoF pose of the Spatial Anchor relative to the headset

Persist the Spatial Anchor on device

Retrieve a list of currently tracked Spatial Anchors

Delete Spatial Anchors

Availability

Spatial Anchors is available for OpenXR and Unity developers in the v35 SDK release, with support for other development platforms coming in the future. This experimental API allows you to start building and testing Spatial Anchor-based experiences on Quest devices. The production version of Spatial Anchors will be available in the future, and at that point you’ll be able to ship these experiences to your users on the Oculus Store or App Lab.

Get started by downloading the v35 SDK release. To learn more about Spatial Anchors, and how they work with other Insight SDK capabilities, watch our session from Connect 2021⁠ or read our documentation.

Voice SDK

Voice SDK is a set of natural language capabilities that empowers you to create hands-free navigation and new voice-driven gameplay. With Voice SDK, you can create Voice Navigation & Search to help people get to where they want to go more quickly, or enable Voice FAQ to allow users to ask for help or a reminder. We’re also enabling Voice-Driven Gameplay—like winning a battle with a voice-activated magic spell or talking with a character or avatar. Voice SDK is powered by Meta’s Wit.ai⁠ natural language platform.

Since our Voice SDK Experimental release last month, we are seeing developers use multiple Presence Platform capabilities in their experiences, like multimodal interactions with hand-activated voice spell casting in Waltz of the Wizard: Natural Magic⁠, or talk into your wrist to teleport to people and places with Multiverse⁠.

Get the Voice SDK in the v35 SDK release. Learn more in our Voice SDK documentation or if you missed the Connect 2021 session “Bringing Voice Interactions in VR,” you can watch it here⁠.

More Presence Platform capabilities coming soon

We’re excited to see the mixed reality experiences you build with Presence Platform for Quest devices. With these new capabilities, and even more coming soon, we can begin to explore what the metaverse might look like, and we’re committed to helping you create the connected, interoperable worlds that lie ahead.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know in the Developer Forums⁠.

Design

OpenXR

Presence platform

Quest

Unity

Unreal

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