Enhancing the VR/MR Experience with Our Visual Positioning System (VPS)

Every time you put on your Meta Quest and launch an app, your headset recalls details about your room, including the safety boundary, space layout, and your app content, so you can get into your experience quickly.

Sometimes your headset may not be able to recall the room you’re in. This can happen if you haven’t used your Quest in that space in a while or if there have been big changes in your room’s appearance, like different lighting or moved furniture. When this happens, it takes longer to start your app because you need to set up your boundary, room layout, and app content again.

Today, we’re excited to share more about our visual positioning system (VPS) that launched with v60. VPS is a cloud service that extends your Quest’s ability to remember spaces and provides more robust mixed reality content recall over a larger number of spaces. VPS has already helped Quest users get into their apps faster more than 100 million times. With VPS launch and other improvements made since, we’ve seen a 50% reduction in Boundary Not Found events for those people who use VPS.

The Benefits of VPS

• More Robust Mixed Reality Content: With VPS, your headset can better recognize your space and find your MR content right where you left it in your last session.
• Improved Boundary Persistence: VPS helps your headset remember your space and its boundaries. That means you won’t have to redraw boundaries and can jump into your virtual or mixed reality experience faster.
• Improved Space Setup Persistence: VPS also helps your headset remember your room layout. That means you’re less likely to see a “Scene Not Found” message and won’t need to rescan your space.
• Use Quest in More Places: VPS lets you use your Quest in more places than before. You can enjoy VR and MR at home, at work, or on the go.

How Does VPS Work?

VPS uses visual cues from your space to determine the position of your Quest with respect to its surroundings. This is important because it allows for more accurate and immersive experiences in virtual and mixed reality, like being able to place a virtual Chess board on a table and have it stay there day after day.

VPS enhances your headset’s ability to understand its position within a space by extending your Quest’s inside-out tracking with cloud storage and computing power. VPS creates more accurate and more robust spatial maps, making it more resilient to changes like lighting variations between day and night, changing clutter, and more. VPS also lets you save content in more rooms without losing it between sessions.

How to Activate VPS On Your Headset

To turn on VPS, use the “Point Cloud Data Sharing” option in Settings. When you enable Point Cloud Data Sharing, your Quest periodically backs up its point cloud data to the cloud and starts using VPS to determine which room you’re in and what your position in the room is. You can turn VPS off at any time, and your Quest will stop backing up your point clouds.

The setting is located under Settings > Privacy and Safety > Device Permissions > Share Point Cloud Data. You can also activate VPS from the “Share Point Cloud Data” permission request dialog that periodically appears when you set up your guardian boundary.

To delete your backed-up point clouds go to Settings > Privacy and Safety > Device Permissions > Delete Shared Storage.

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