Manage spatial data sharing on Meta Quest
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Updated: With Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, and Meta Quest Pro, you can decide whether or not to provide individual apps access to spatial data.
Enhanced spatial services enable experiences that go beyond your headset’s hardware capabilities, like local multiplayer. To power these experiences, enhanced spatial services share spatial data about your surroundings with Meta servers. You can choose to turn off enhanced spatial services anytime in Settings.
Learn more about spatial data
Spatial data refers to the information collected about the size, shape, and location of walls, surfaces, and objects in a physical space. Apps that blend virtual and real-world environments use spatial data to understand the space around you and where you are within that space.
Meta Quest uses spatial data to create a digital model of a space by:
- Recognizing objects and surfaces (examples: outlines of furniture, walls, and doors)
- Labeling objects (examples: table, couch, windows)
- Estimating the size, shape, and distance of those objects in relation to each other and your headset.
Spatial data enables room setup and lets apps create blended experiences within your real-world space.
How apps use spatial data
When you grant an app access to your spatial data, the app can use it to create or enhance experiences, such as by making virtual objects seem real. Some examples of how apps may use spatial data include:
- Placement: Apps can use spatial data to place virtual content on your walls, tables, and floor, like a table-top game that anchors a virtual board game to the surface of your table.
- Occlusions: Apps can use spatial data to make it appear as though virtual content obscures your view of real-world objects. For example, if a large virtual object is in front of your door, you won’t be able to see the door.
- Real-world behaviors: Apps can recreate familiar real-world behaviors with virtual objects, like making a ball bounce off your wall or making a virtual pet hide or disappear around physical objects, like a sofa.
- Navigation: Apps can use spatial data to help virtual objects move naturally within a room and around physical objects.
How Meta uses spatial data for enhanced spatial services
Enhanced spatial services share spatial data about your surroundings with Meta servers to enable experiences that go beyond your headset’s hardware capabilities.
Meta servers use this information to understand the space around you and where you are within that space to improve experiences that blend your virtual and real-world environments.
These include:
- Reduce boundary redrawing: Enhanced spatial services enable boundaries and their exact locations to be more accurately remembered over multiple sessions, which reduces the need to redraw boundaries.
- Reduce the need to scan your space: Enhanced spatial services enable your device to more accurately remember your space so that you don’t have to scan it multiple times.
- Local multiplayer: Enhanced spatial services enable experiences where two or more people with Meta Quest headsets can see and interact with the same virtual content in the same physical space. This is called local multiplayer.
In the future, these may include things like a larger and richer representation of your space.
Types of spatial data
Spatial data, together with spatial anchors, is the foundation of blended and immersive experiences on Meta Quest devices. Below is a visual representation and description of spatial data types used to power mixed reality experiences:
Scene data is used to create a simplified model of a room and enables more physical awareness of a user’s surroundings. Without scene data, virtual objects cannot interact with physical objects.
Mesh data allows the headset to understand the shape and structure of objects in a physical space. Without mesh data, virtual objects are not able to realistically interact with physical environments.
Depth data allows the headset to understand the distance between objects in a physical space. Without depth data, virtual objects cannot be rendered in the environment in a way that feels three-dimensional.
Point cloud data is used by your headset to figure out its position relative to the rest of your surroundings using a set of points. Meta uses point cloud data to reduce the need to redraw boundaries and enables experiences such as local multiplayer.
Support by Meta Quest device
| Meta Quest 2 | Meta Quest Pro | Meta Quest 3 | |
| Scene data |  Check | Check | Check |
| Mesh data | Check | ||
| Depth data | Check | ||
| Point cloud data | Check | Check | Check |
Granting apps access to spatial data
With Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, and Meta Quest Pro, you can decide whether or not individual apps have access to spatial data.
When you open an app that uses spatial data to blend your virtual and real-world environments, you’ll need to decide whether to grant that app access to your spatial data. If you choose to share spatial data with an app, that app’s policies apply.
You can select Allow or Don’t allow. Selecting Don’t allow may result in a degraded experience or may prevent the app from working. Keep in mind, you can review or change spatial data app permissions at any time in Settings.
Review or change spatial data permissions for apps
To review or change your spatial data sharing settings:
- Press
Meta button /
Oculus button on your right Touch controller to pull up your universal menu.
- Hover over the clock on the left side of the universal menu. When Quick Settings appears, select it to open the Quick Settings panel.
- Select
Settings in the top right corner.
- Select
App library to open the Apps permissions menu.
- Select Spatial data to review apps you’re sharing spatial data with, or select an individual app to review spatial data sharing settings for that app.
- Select the toggle next to each app to turn spatial data sharing on or off.
Manage enhanced spatial services
You can manage enhanced spatial services, which includes the ability to:
- Turn off enhanced spatial services
- Delete enhanced spatial services spatial data
- Clear physical space history
To turn off enhanced spatial services:
- Press
- Hover over the clock on the left side of the universal menu. When Quick Settings appears, select it to open the Quick Settings panel.
- Select
- Select Device permissions, then select the toggle next to Enhanced spatial services.
- Select Turn off.
Turning off enhanced spatial services will delete previously shared spatial data from Meta servers.
To delete enhanced spatial services spatial data:
You can delete spatial data that you previously shared using enhanced spatial services at any time. When you delete this information, it can’t be recovered.
- Press
- Hover over the clock on the left side of the universal menu. When Quick Settings appears, select it to open the Quick Settings panel.
- Select
- Select Device permissions.
- Next to Delete spatial data from Meta servers, select Delete.
- Select Delete.
To clear physical space history:
You can also clear physical space history to remove this information for all profiles on your headset. This includes boundaries, space setup and spatial anchors from certain apps you’ve used.
- Press
- Hover over the clock on the left side of the universal menu. When Quick Settings appears, select it to open the Quick Settings panel.
- Select
- Select Device permissions.
- Next to Clear physical space history, select Clear.
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