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Immersive headsets, spatial anchors, and world scale experiences.

From my limited understanding, immersive headsets support spatial anchors according to the developer documentation. Also according to the same documentation, spatial anchors will allow a device to develop a world-scale experience. So I guess I have two questions from this that I am struggling to understand:

  • Are immersive headsets room-scale or world-scale experiences? I thought they were still tethered to a PC.
  • Can anyone come up with an example of how a spatial anchor in an immersive headset be useful?

Thanks for reading.

Best Answers

  • ahalimahalim ✭✭
    Answer ✓
    I am relatively new too but here are my understandings:

    Immersive headset does not support world scale. It supports up to room scale which is limited by 5 meter radius. The use of anchor in immersive can still apply for sharing location purpose. Several headsets can work on the same location environment with shared locations.

Answers

  • ahalimahalim ✭✭
    Answer ✓
    I am relatively new too but here are my understandings:

    Immersive headset does not support world scale. It supports up to room scale which is limited by 5 meter radius. The use of anchor in immersive can still apply for sharing location purpose. Several headsets can work on the same location environment with shared locations.
  • ahalimahalim ✭✭
    Sorry, typo: radius should read diameter.
  • If that's the case, then I really wish that was made clearer in the documentation. Because this is what I saw which made me think immersive headsets were capable of world-scale experience:

    Once again @ahalim, thank you for your help.

  • ahalimahalim ✭✭
    I see how the confusion came. Well the spatial anchor is just some data types to place coordinates system in several spots. It can be used to help implement world scale but to support world scale you need more than that. The device itself must have hardware features to do that via some kinda env and depth sensors etc. Spatial Mapping is the interface for those actual hardware capabilities in Hololens.
  • Hello,
    I made some tests with the Acer headset and I was able to get out my office and go to other rooms. I was just limited by the cable. The tracking was stable I just lost it when I faced mirrors.

    French XR/MR developer / Indie Game Developer

  • @demonixis
    Are immersive headsets like the Acer able to reason about the world? Meaning, can it identify floor or tables, or do you have to define those things yourself?

  • ahalimahalim ✭✭

    Demonixis was referring to the inside-out tracking where the sensor tracks the location and orientation of the headset as you move around, this is to create the illusion of moving inside the virtual world. That said this has nothing to do with spatial mapping where the geometry of the physical surrounding is being scanned and calculated.

  • @ahalim, ok that answers my question then. Thanks.

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