I stood in Gordon Ramsay’s absolutely lovely kitchen and stared at the Smeg toaster on his polished counters. I admired the windows to the garden, the jukebox in the corner and the adjoining open living room. I tried to walk in the living room and hit a VR barrier. That’s where the scan ended.
Gordon’s home was a Quest-made 3D scan, a still-life of his lovely LA abode. I almost felt like I could sit down in a chair and wait for him to walk into the room, brandish a soufflé… and yell at me.
Meta previewed Hyperscape, a Gaussian Splat AI toolset for creating walkthrough 3D scans of real spaces, last year at Meta Connect. This year, the app is going live as Hyperscape Capture, announced at this year’s Meta Connect conference. Any Quest 3 and Quest 3S owner can use it. With the headset’s cameras, you can walk around and scan your space in minutes. Hours later, you’ll get a result that should, hopefully, feel as amazing as the scans I tried.
Gaussian splatting, a technique for 3D scanning of spaces, isn’t new. Many companies already have apps and tools that showcase impressive scans, but the process of making these scans is often awkward, requiring patience and either your phone or specialized equipment to capture them.
Meta’s app impressed me because the final results I previewed — a pastry shop in California, Happy Kelli’s Croc room (there were lots of Crocs), and Chance the Rapper’s studio, which had some wild full-size furry characters in it — felt as real as the pass-through video quality on the Quest 3’s cameras.
These captures are still-lives, though. Nothing moves. And right now, the Capture app just allows private viewing of your captures. But Meta’s next plans are to open up Horizon Worlds to upload personal spaces there, so avatars can visit and interact inside them. It’s a possible stepping stone to something feeling like telepresence, especially when Meta evolves its avatars to be as realistic as Apple’s personas, featured in the Vision Pro headset. It’s something Meta’s shown off in prototypes for years, but isn’t available yet.
The captures I experienced felt like snapshot living memories, more spatial than Apple’s own spatial photos. And I wonder when Apple, and others like Google, will enable similar tech for their own VR devices.
Right now, Meta enabling this level of 3D scanning quality on a headset as low as $300 feels like a bit of magic. It’s also one of the few new things Meta’s announced for VR at an otherwise very glasses-focused event this year.
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