Spatial anchors are world-locked frames of reference you can use to position content. They are rigid transforms that represent fixed physical locations in the real

You can use spatial anchors to enrich the user experience in many ways, such as placing virtual signs on real furniture, or creating spawn points on real windows for virtual characters to fly through.

You can create, save, share, discover, erase, and destroy spatial anchors. We will examine each of these in the following sections.

Each anchor has a universally unique identifier (UUID) associated with it. If you want to manage content rendered against an anchor across sessions or shared with others, you’ll need to keep track of a mapping of the anchor’s UUID to the content it’s associated with.

You can create a spatial anchor by using the xrCreateSpatialAnchorFB API. See the API Reference page for more.

A spatial anchor will be locatable at the time of creation, you can call xrLocateSpace every frame with the reference space used to create the anchor. Read more about the xrLocateSpace API in the OpenXR specification.

In order to track an anchor from different sources (e.g., discovery, query), you must first localize it by successfully calling xrSetSpaceComponentStatusFB with the XR_SPACE_COMPONENT_TYPE_LOCATABLE_FB component on the anchor. You can then call xrLocateSpace on it.

Spatial anchors can be persisted beyond the lifetime of an app’s session. This allows you to recover a previously created spatial anchor the next time the user runs your app, providing a greater sense of connection with the real world.

In order to persist a spatial anchor, you must first enable the XR_SPACE_COMPONENT_TYPE_STORABLE_FB component on the anchor. You can do this by calling xrSetSpaceComponentStatusFB with the XR_SPACE_COMPONENT_TYPE_STORABLE_FB component. You can then save a Spatial Anchor by calling the xrSaveSpacesMETA API. See the API Reference page for more.

You can discover a collection of anchors from various sources. It will return previously app-persisted anchors and system-persisted anchors (i.e. the Scene Model).

You can Discover anchors by using the xrDiscoverSpacesMETA API. See the API Reference page for more.

You can share anchors with other users to enable local colocation experiences.

Before sharing an anchor, you must first enable the XR_SPACE_COMPONENT_TYPE_SHARABLE_FB component on the anchor. You can do this by calling xrSetSpaceComponentStatusFB with the XR_SPACE_COMPONENT_TYPE_SHARABLE_FB component on the anchor. You can then share a spatial anchor by using the xrShareSpacesMETA API. See the API Reference page for more.

You can query for anchors which were shared with you.

You can Query for shared anchors by using the xrQuerySpacesFB API by specifying Cloud as the Storage Location and specifying either the UUIDs for the anchors shared to you, or the Group UUID the anchors were shared with. See the API Reference page for more.

A spatial anchor can be erased from persist storage. Note that erasing an anchor is different from destroying an anchor. Erase removes it from persistent storage, but does not affect existing runtime instances already loaded into memory. Once erased, a spatial anchor will not be available in future sessions.

You can erase an anchor, either by its XrSpace handle or by its UUID, via the xrEraseSpacesMETA API, if the anchor’s XR_SPACE_COMPONENT_TYPE_STORABLE_FB component is enabled. See the API Reference page for more.

When you destroy a spatial anchor, you destroy the runtime instance. Note this does not affect the state of the anchor in persist storage. Although a virtual object that was using the spatial anchor remains, its transforms will no longer be driven by the spatial anchor, so it is no longer locked to its previous real-world location.

You can destroy an anchor by using the xrDestroySpace API. Read more about xrDestroySpace in the OpenXR specification.