Meta Plans To Make Quest Scene Mesh Scans Update Automatically

Meta is seemingly planning to make Quest’s 3D scene mesh automatically update when there are changes to your physical environment.

First spotted by VR enthusiast Luna, the changelog for v72 of the Meta XR Core SDK includes the following notice:

We are on a path to remove the user’s capability to edit the space settings in 2025, so developers should work to reduce dependency on this feature as it is incompatible with our vision of high-reliable scans that just work even when the scenes change.

Both Quest 3 and Quest 3S let you scan your room to generate a 3D scene mesh that mixed reality apps can use to reskin your environment or allow virtual objects to interact with physical geometry. But these scene mesh scans represent only a moment in time, when you performed the scan. If furniture has moved or objects have been added or removed from the room since then, these changes won’t be reflected in mixed reality unless the user manually updates the scan. For example, if someone was standing in the room with you during the scan, their body shape is baked into the scene mesh.

In contrast, Apple Vision Pro and Pico 4 Ultra have continuous automatic scene meshing. Rather than having to perform a scan at all, these headsets are constantly scanning your environment in the background, providing a dynamic up-to-date mesh to the currently running app. The reason these headsets can do this is that they have hardware-level active depth sensors, whereas Quest 3 and Quest 3S use computationally expensive computer vision algorithms to derive depth (in Quest 3’s case, assisted by a projected IR pattern).

Based on the notice in the v72 SDK changelog, it sounds like Meta’s upcoming solution will be a middle ground. It would, based on the description, still require the user to perform the initial scan, but update the mesh automatically in the background to reflect changes in the physical environment.

Given Meta’s computational approach it seems possible that this improvement will incur a penalty to battery life, for apps that use the scene mesh.

We’ll keep a close eye on Meta’s upcoming Horizon OS updates for any sign of this feature shipping, as it should provide a significant upgrade to the mixed reality experience on Quest.