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Spatial anchors

What are spatial anchors?

Spatial anchors lets you persist virtual content in the physical world. This means you can place virtual content in a specific, physical location (e.g., your wall) and see them in the exact same place every time you return to the same spot, just like a physical object. With spatial anchors, designers can anchor several 3D schematics in place in Gravity Sketch; or a group of friends might anchor the game world in Demeo to their table surface so they can return to the same setup and continue their game the following day.

Figure 1.1: Anchor virtual content in the physical world

What can we do with spatial anchors?

Persistent content in physical space

With spatial anchors, you can persist virtual objects over multiple sessions. This means, you can create experiences, like scavenger hunts or wayfinding, that require you to anchor virtual objects to physical locations. When you use spatial anchors, you can resume and restore content to the same physical locations where users left them.

The example below shows the virtual game Slimeball! persisting across sessions on a physical table.

Figure 1.2: Virtual game on a physical table

Video 1.0: Slimeball's game board with spatial anchor persists after several days

Placement on physical surfaces

Spatial anchors enhance room-scale experiences by integrating with semantic surfaces like walls, tables, and floors. This integration transforms the user’s room into a canvas for gameplay and productivity. Developers can anchor virtual objects, such as a door, to physical surfaces. When the user opens this virtual door, it reveals an immersive world with characters that can interact with the physical space.

Shared experience with other users

Shared spatial anchors allows anchors created by one person to be shared with others in the same physical space. This lets you build local multiplayer experiences by creating a shared, world-locked frame of reference for multiple users. For example, two or more people can sit at the same physical table and play a virtual board game on top of it.

Designing co-located local multiplayer experiences

What is co-location?

The phrase “co-location” or “co-located” can be used to describe any experience where two or more users are located in the same physical space at the same time. Typically, both (or all!) users are wearing separate headsets or devices and sharing an immersive experience.

Importantly, co-location is a state of play. It’s not necessarily limited by form factor, level of immersion, or type of reality experiences. Users can be co-located in fully immersive experiences, mixed reality, or blended experiences, and even in completely separate immersive experiences!

Why is it better with mixed reality?

In-person social interaction is one of the most natural ways we build meaningful connections, yet fully immersive experiences can disconnect us from the people who are physically around us. Co-located immersive experiences enable users to reduce time spent in isolation in-headset and stay connected to others, now sharing exciting experiences virtual and in-person.

Co-location isn’t just about playing the same game in the same room—users report engaging in three “states” of co-location so far.

Figure 1.3: Different forms of co-location include shared space with shared experience, separate space with a shared experience, and a separate space with a separate experience

See Health and safety documentation for more design considerations on co-located experiences.

The principles of co-location

So far, there are three identified principles that we believe can be used to inform our understanding of what draws users to co-located experiences, and which applications may have potential as “good,” “effective,” or “successful” co-located experiences.

Establish a shared reality: A “shared reality” is an “understanding of the world that is shared with someone else, which can be developed through a shared experience.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that users have to experience the same fantastical world to share a connected experience, but it does mean that there should be some semblance of overlapping experience for co-located users.
Make co-location a necessary part of the experience: Lots of things can be done together but that doesn’t mean that doing them while co-located will necessarily change or inform the experience. Consider how experiences might change or be impacted when multiple people are located and playing together.
Engage users with goals of competition, cooperation, learning, and/or social sharing: Users are interested in sharing competition, working on things together, learning something new or together, and sharing their time. Consider experiences that build on these interests.

Shared spatial anchor Unity and Unreal app

The Co-Location Health and Safety sample app is created to provide you with the ability to easily implement warning features. The app includes safety features such as directional passthrough and segmented passthrough. Directional and segmented passthrough provide visual cues of other co-located users in their periphery that are blocked by the restricted headset field of view. Please see the pages below for more details.

Case study: Discover showcase app

Discover, our new showcase app available on GitHub, demonstrates the concepts of co-located multiplayer experience in mixed reality, scene understanding, and safety and mobility.

Video 2.0: Multiple users are playing virtual games in one shared setting

Note: Be careful of other users in local multiplayer. Please check out ‘Health and safety best practices for co-location’ section under Health and safety guideline for more details.

This app showcases experiences that cover:

Building/co-building experience: The user is able to interact with multiple virtual objects, build something using them, while viewing their surroundings. On top of this, they can work with other users to build, with natural interactions (e.g., passing objects to other users as you do in reality).
Social watching: We showcase a way for users to watch videos on a virtual screen, and have additional information layers that can enhance their watching experience. This becomes better as they can do this with people coming over, or people who are not in the same physical location.
Shared physical space: With scene understanding, family and friends can utilize the same physical space to experience shared content that utilizes their environment.

Each of the experiences can be experienced alone, with people present in the same physical location, and with people present in different physical locations.

Next steps

Designing mixed reality experiences

Check out our design guidelines for other important elements of mixed reality, learn what you can do with them and how to design great mixed reality experiences.

Overview: Learn the basics of designing for mixed reality.
General best practices: How to start designing for mixed reality, including best practices for interacting with virtual content in mixed reality.
Scene understanding: Use the physical world as a canvas using Scene Understanding.
Passthrough: Blend virtual objects with the physical environment using Passthrough.
Health and safety: Learn how to design safe mixed reality experiences.

Developing mixed reality experiences

We’ve listed documentation that will help you learn how to develop mixed reality experiences.

Unity

Unreal

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