Quest 3's Space Setup gained an undocumented superpower
Meta Quest 3 can now identify and label furniture and other furnishings, making it much easier to set up rooms for mixed reality.
Unlike previous Quest headsets, Quest 3 has a depth sensor that can be used to create a 3D scan of your environment. This feature is called "Space Setup" and can be found under Settings > Physical Space. The digital duplicate of your home provides spatial information that makes mixed reality apps more realistic by enabling object occlusion and collision or special lighting effects.
Space Setup received a major update in Quest update v64, which oddly enough was not mentioned in the release notes or on the Quest blog. There is no official information on what the improved Space Setup entails.
X user Squashi was the first to report on the new capabilities (see below). I've run Space Setup right before and after v64 and can confirm that new functionality has been added. Here are some of my first impressions.
A big step forward for Quest 3
Before the update, Space Setup in my apartment could only detect walls. I had to manually draw and label furniture such as sofas, tables, chairs, and cabinets, as well as doors, pictures and posters on my walls, and my TV.
After the update, not only were the walls better identified, but many of these pieces of furniture were correctly outlined and labeled.
A undocumented feature in Meta Quest v64 found by @Squashi9
Here is some of my own footage testing this functionality in a much larger space: https://t.co/3hWx6kzsBF pic.twitter.com/TC21acNkHk
- Luna (@Lunayian) April 14, 2024
However, there's still plenty of room for improvement: a more complex wall structure and some larger objects were not sufficiently detected, and my TV wasn't recognized on the second test run. The mixed reality shooter Home Invasion refused to work because the room setup did not feature enough walls, doors, or windows, forcing me to manually add those elements.
A few weeks ago, Meta demonstrated SceneScript, a software, that can automatically reconstruct a space and label objects. It is not known whether parts of this technology have been incorporated into the improved Space Setup capabilities.
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