We have tried multi-room mixed reality on Quest 3 and it works really well
Did you know that Meta Quest 3 supports multi-room mixed reality? MIXED tested the feature with the mixed reality horror game Hauntify.
In the spring, Meta introduced two major enhancements to Room Setup, the feature that allows you to scan and save physical rooms for mixed reality.
First, it now supports an area of up to 200 square meters for MR games, and second, it connects previously scanned adjacent rooms. Together, these features enable a large-scale mixed reality experience that spans throughout your home.
Currently, there are not many MR games that take advantage of this new freedom of movement. When Hauntify developer David Montecalvo recently pointed out to me that his horror game now supports multi-room mixed reality, I wanted to give it a try.
A mixed reality haunting that spans my entire home
My three-room apartment doesn't push the limits of multi-room mixed reality, but it's big enough to try out the new feature.
Hauntify provides instructions for optimal space setup. In practice, this is easier than the 4 minute video tutorial suggests. First, I scanned one room at a time and saved each room separately (bedroom, dining room, living room). Meta Quest immediately recognized that the rooms were connected. Hauntify also recommends deleting all doors that do not lead to a scanned room and drawing a large border in the central room.
In the MR game, you can see the areas where the ghosts can move. The green area correctly covered all three rooms in my apartment, so I could finally get started.
Hauntify turns your home into a haunted house where ghosts appear and haunt you.
Whether it was a creepy little girl or a dark shadowy figure, the evil spirits chased me around the rooms with ease and are realistically obscured by scanned walls and some objects. I was also able to move freely around my home without any tracking interruptions or boundary popping up.
Hauntify's sound effects, artificial dimming, and virtual flashlight turned my daylight home into a creepy place. The Quest 3's imperfect passthrough can make the world look a little creepy on its own, and with Hauntify, the real and digital stimuli sometimes blend together in such a way that you think you're seeing things that aren't even there.
A big step forward for mixed reality
The fact that Hauntify's room setup is so simple and works so well shows how far Meta Quest's mixed reality support has come. When I first tried Hauntify three years ago, I had to draw every wall by hand. Still, there is plenty of room for improvement: I would appreciate it if Meta Quest could scan and update room meshes in real time. A feature that will hopefully come with the next generation of Quest.
As far as Hauntify goes, the MR experience still feels more like a demo than a real game. For the future, I'd like to see more sophisticated gameplay mechanics and more visually subtle ghosts that blend in better with the environment.
You can buy Hauntify from the Horizon Store. It costs $7.
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