Meta Developers

Note: Sharing anchors is available for UE 4.27 or later with Meta Quest 3 on SDK v59 or higher, Quest Pro on v47 or higher, and Quest 2 on v49 or higher. Quest 1 does not support sharing anchors.

This sample demonstrates the usage of Spatial Anchors. You will need to follow these instructions to access the sample.

The Shared Spatial Anchors sample project demonstrates the capabilities of the Spatial Anchors system. This sample project also provides example code for handling and maintaining spatial anchors, which you may reuse in your projects. The sample also uses Unreal Engine’s saving and loading systems to store the UUIDs of persisted anchors to app storage.

The sample project is available as part of the samples on GitHub. It implements a menu interface that uses event dispatchers to call functionality within the sample in a way that is easily scalable.

Design

BP_MenuItem: The menu items are the interface actors of the menu. They contain the logic for the visual feedback of the current interaction and for calling the Event Dispatcher to run logic elsewhere in the project.
BP_Menu_Main: This menu handles all the general operations of anchors that don’t relate to individual anchors, such as creating, selecting, and loading anchors.
BP_Menu_Anchor: This menu handles all the operations specific to interacting with selected anchors. This includes saving, unsaving, hiding, and erasing selected anchors.

User Interactions

Move the thumbstick on the right Touch controller up and down to select menu items.
To create a spatial anchor, select Create Anchor and then squeeze the trigger.
To save a spatial anchor to storage:
1. Go to Select Anchor.
2. Point to the spatial anchor you want to save.
3. With Select Anchor selected, squeeze the trigger.
4. Select Save Anchor, and then press A. The anchor is saved to headset storage and to the Unreal save game.
To load saved Spatial Anchors back into the app in subsequent sessions, select Load Anchors.

Lobby

When first opening the app you are placed into a waiting room with passthrough enabled. There is a menu attached to your right controller. There are two options.

Create Session: Selecting this option will create a new local network game session that you will automatically be connected to.
Find Session: Selecting “Find Session” will search for an available local internet session that another local player created. If one is found you will connect to it automatically, otherwise the text will turn red and you will stay in the lobby.

Shared Scene

After creating or joining a network session you will be in a passthrough environment. There is a menu attached to your right controller and has the following options:

Create Anchor: Selecting this option will create a new anchor, the position is defined by a preview anchor visible at the top of the controller.
Select Anchor: When hovering over an anchor in the environment, selecting this option will open a new menu specific to anchors.
Load Anchors: This option will load any anchors that were previously saved via the Save Anchors button.
Spawn Cube: Using this option will spawn a networked cube in the environment, it will spawn from the top of your controller.
Explode Cube: Using this menu option while hovering over a cube in the environment will shoot the cube up into the air.

After spawning and selecting an anchor, an extra menu attached to your right controller appears. This is the anchor menu. Default options are:

Save Anchor Locally: Saves the anchor to your local device.
Save Anchor to Cloud: Saves the anchor to cloud storage. After saving to the cloud you can share the anchor with other users of the session.
Orient to Anchor: This button makes the origin of the world the specified anchor. If you attempt to use this button with more than one anchor the first selected anchor will be used.
Erase Anchor: Deletes the anchor from the scene, and if saved locally, removes the anchor from local storage.

Local Storage

After saving the anchor locally, the following options appear:

Save Anchor to Cloud: Saves the anchor to cloud storage. After saving to the cloud you can share the anchor with other users of the session.
Unsave Anchor: Remove the local anchor from local storage, but do not remove the anchor from the scene.
Hide anchor: Hides the visual representation of the anchor from the scene but the anchor is still saved in local storage.
Orient to Anchor: Orient the entire scene to the selected anchor.
Erase Anchor: Delete the anchor from the game world and remove it from local storage.

Cloud Storage

If you save the anchor to cloud storage, the following options appear:

Save Anchor Locally: Saves the anchor to your local device.
Hide Anchor: Hides the anchor representation, the anchor still exists and you cannot retrieve it when you reboot the app.
Share Anchors: Share the anchor with any users connected to your session. The other connected users will automatically receive and load the anchors. Orient To Anchor: Orient the entire world to the specified anchor.
Erase Anchor: Erases the anchor representation from the game world but does not remove it from cloud storage.