Create engaging experiences with Anchoring improvements and multi-room support

TL;DR: With the launch of v66, we’ve made API improvements to help apps expand users’ experiences across multiple rooms and larger spaces.

It’s no secret that users connect best in mixed reality (MR) experiences when they can navigate and interact naturally with their physical environment. While many factors contribute to engaging app experiences, having resilient and highly accurate virtual content positioning is key. The v66 API additions come together to expand mixed reality experiences and enable new ones.

The release of v66 marks a significant step forward in empowering users to move, explore, and fully utilize their physical environments to play or collaborate. Before v66, people had the ability to move within a confined boundary within one room. Starting with v66, the Spatial Anchors and Scene APIs allow apps to engage users in a new dimension where the apps’ virtual content blends with their physical environment and they can move freely. These new experiences enhance the sense of realism and presence, because the virtual objects interact with users' unique surroundings across their entire space.

The new virtual content positioning improvements with Anchors and Scene APIs allow apps to suspend belief and bring people together in enriched worlds where the digital content becomes more immersive and feels cohesive with users' physical space. Starting with v66, Meta Quest apps can create captivating experiences that defy the laws of physics or follow them indistinguishably from the real world.

These changes will enable you to drive innovation in a variety of use cases—from MR games to house tours to fitness workouts and more—and will provide your apps with new resilience features to deliver a better, more consistent user experience that adapts to their environment on the go. Our goal is to have your apps’ virtual content behave like any object in the real world so it can be placed, persisted, and shared to open a world of new possibilities.

Let’s dive deeper into these updates and get first-hand insights from Johan Hanegraaf, Co-founder and Head of Product at Arkio, a 3D modeling app that aims to give people design superpowers and experience the future before it’s built. For Arkio, Anchors and Scene API improvements have helped deliver an improved and engaging user experience.

Spatial Anchor and Scene Anchor improvements in v66 unlock resilience powered by Meta Quest Point Clouds, which work to increase anchor accuracy across all Meta Quest devices to unlock large space tracking on Meta Quest 3.

Both Spatial Anchors and Scene (with elements such as walls) will accurately remain world-locked while users navigate freely within their surroundings. This allows for stability in roomscale experiences that involve realistic physics—like Arkio—so creators can design buildings and interior spaces in MR, fully immersive environments, and everything in between.

“Arkio has the ability to create geometry on human scale and model scale, and switching between these scales is important in our user experience,” says Hanegraaf. “To make sure that our user’s creations stay aligned to the real world we rely heavily on the usage of Spatial Anchors in our scenes. Each scene can contain a number of saved Anchor positions that will help them to align their designs in human scale and switch back and forth between design options.”

In the video above, you can see an example of how accurate positioning can play an important role as people alter 3D buildings and rooms to add or adjust windows, doors, and dimensions in MR. The Spatial Anchors API improvements delivered in v66 help ensure people can stay physically engaged in spaces of up to 200 sqm. Starting with v66 virtual content can be persisted, discovered and reinstated throughout the user’s physical space across multiple rooms. Thanks to the new Discovery API, disjointly captured areas can be queried and shown together so apps create continuity while users explore their space. Put simply, this means that app experiences can now adapt to users’ surroundings in real-time to allow people to enjoy the app experience as they move around their physical spaces.

Historically, one of the biggest restrictions to believability is that MR developers have been limited to creating roomscale apps that are tied to a boundary. While boundaries were initially essential to help systems identify, query, and interact with physical surroundings, enabling people to move around without restriction opens up numerous possibilities to heighten believability and deliver a more engaging experience.

With new multi-room support in v66, existing roomscale apps can now seamlessly adapt to additional spaces and rooms without breaking functionality. During Space Setup, people will be able to scan and persist up to 15 rooms on-device so the system can adapt to changing environments. To deepen presence further, you can integrate Boundary API to disable the guardian boundary and allow people more flexibility to move around naturally in-headset.

For apps like Arkio and many others, maneuverability is especially important when entering MR mode. Enabling people to navigate their visible, physical space without disruption as they model and design spatial environments prevents disruptions and allows people to build and collaborate efficiently. “When you are working in a physical space and modeling digitally and you need to freely move around multiple rooms of your space, the guardian system puts a major movement restriction that slows and limits the workflow of our users,” says Hanegraaf. “Our users now no longer need to think about these boundaries as they can move around more freely and model new design ideas on top of their real environment.”

Removing the guardian boundary can heighten believability in a variety of MR app experiences by enabling people to engage with apps in their own way. People can make use of their entire space to accommodate higher-intensity workouts with fitness apps, navigate through different rooms to up the thrill factor for shooter-based games, find inspiration through changing rooms when enjoying a painting app, and more.

APIs that allow people to navigate through multiple spaces in their physical surroundings also create opportunities for developers to leverage physical environments in innovative ways. In Arkio, room data from large and multi-room spaces directly translates into a more individualized and engaging experience where people can reinvent their physical surroundings. “A workflow that we have been building is the ability to import the room scan data of the Quest room setup to be converted to Arkio geometry so users can quickly map out their existing spaces and make edits using our modeling tools,” says Hanegraaf. “This is an ideal workflow for our users to set up their Arkio scene.”

These new APIs open up a host of possibilities for new use cases, and we're excited to see what you build with them. We also want to empower you to iterate effectively. For that, we came up with a set of best practices and we’ll further share Arkio’s development process. Goran Lalić, senior engineer at Arkio, emphasized the importance of creating a diagnosable development environment along with product development: “We invested time into creating advanced logging and in-house diagnostic tools that allow us to listen to specific logs and log events while the app is live. This is especially important for debugging multiple devices running in parallel, as you can observe the application events propagating between devices in real-time and how the devices respond - [which is] absolutely crucial when trying to find which step is failing in a distributed process. In addition, we created a way to live-configure the app via remote commands during runtime. These new tools ended up greatly reducing our iteration times, and made bug hunting easier, even in a distributed environment when debugging colocation.”

For more tips on how best utilize Anchors, please review the use cases and interaction model.

Anchor improvements with multi-room and Boundaryless support can be enabled starting v66. As we continue on building out the breadth and functionality of MR capabilities on Meta Quest, our goal is to provide intuitive and simple evolutions of our APIs so you can integrate fast and with minimal effort. Therefore, accessing benefits mentioned won't require a full new API integration. Instead, the new APIs require minimal code changes, see the examples for Unity:

Example 1: create an Anchor with Unity

Example 2: save an Anchor with Unity

Example 3: re-load an Anchor with Unity

To speed up your adoption, please refer to our code samples: Unity | Unreal | OpenXR and our Unity Tutorial.

Published apps will continue to function as designed for smaller spaces while using existing query APIs. For new and unpublished apps, we recommend adopting the newer overloads, see comparison table below for benefits:

As MR experiences become more complex and use cases expand, natural interaction and shared experiences will remain key to create a sense of presence and engagement with Quest users. We’re excited to enable your app experiences to take full advantage of people’s physical space and we can’t wait to see how you innovate with added room to connect, play, and work.

To dive deeper into each of the updates above and learn how to implement, please visit the documentation below.

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