Passthrough API Overview

Health and Safety Recommendation: While building mixed reality experiences, we highly recommend evaluating your content to offer your users a comfortable and safe experience. Please refer to the Health and Safety and Design guidelines before designing and developing your app using Passthrough.

Passthrough provides a real-time and perceptually comfortable 3D visualization of the physical world within Meta Quest headsets. Passthrough API allows developers to integrate the passthrough visualization with their virtual experiences.

Passthrough is rendered by a dedicated service into a separate layer. Because apps cannot access images or videos of a user’s physical environment, they create a special passthrough layer. The XR Compositor replaces this layer with the actual passthrough rendition.

The Passthrough API creates this passthrough layer automatically (using automatic environment reconstruction), and submits it directly to the XR Compositor.

You can customize the passthrough layer with styling. Styling lets you colorize the passthrough feed, highlight edges, and perform image processing effects such as contrast adjustment and posterizations of the image, by stair-stepping the grayscale values to achieve the desired effect.