—     Niantic’s groundbreaking VR tech is now available as a native app

—     Visit famous landmarks and hidden treasures, captured in vivid 3D

—     Explore over 50,000 3D scenes, with new scenes appearing every day

—     Add your own 3D scans to the map to view and share them instantly

Sure, you can see brilliant pictures of faraway places… or you can be there, instantly transported across the globe to experience a slice of the world you’d never see otherwise.

Welcome to Into the Scaniverse (ITS). Following the launch of our browser-based Web XR version late last year, we’re now releasing Into the Scaniverse as a free downloadable app for the Meta Quest 3 and 3S VR headsets. You’ll find it waiting for you in the Meta Store right now.

So what does it do? Well, for starters, this:

Built in Niantic Studio, Into the Scaniverse lets you travel the globe and dive into incredibly vivid 3D scenes, everything from famous landmarks to hidden treasures, all shared by everyday explorers just like you. We just happened to find “The Mirror Man” there (by South Korean artist Yoo Young-ho) when we cruised through Bursa, Turkey. But that’s exactly the kind of accidental discoveries you’ll make all the time when you go Into the Scaniverse.

Because these aren’t corporate-currated locales. ITS offers you thousands of unique perspectives from people making their own discoveries as they travel through the world. So yes, you can hop over to Stonehenge to walk between the rocks—way closer than you’d get in person, and without bumping into fellow tourists. Or you might zoom in to the ancient ruins of Myrmecium, a Greek colony in the Crimea circa the 6th Century. But you can also poke into an Elvis shrine in England. Creep up on a wood-carved alligator hiding in the ivy in Oakland. Visit the dragons at Kiyomizu-dera.

Journey to places you’ve never been, immerse in art, culture, and history, and experience corners of our world you might’ve never seen otherwise. There’s something to explore on nearly every continent (you’re next, Antarctica), and fresh surprises wherever you wander. We’ve even got a few starter locations for you to check out.

You could also just drop in for a look at this fine fellow.

Every scene is created by an active community spanning over 120 countries, using the Niantic Scaniverse app. It takes just a few minutes to make a 3D scan with your phone—technically known as a Gaussian splat, which is honestly more fun to say—and upload it to the map, where it’s instantly viewable in VR. The Scaniverse mobile app also processes your splats on your phone, without any need for WiFi or cellular data, so you can check the splat quality right then and there.

No other 3D scanner offers that loop… fast, quality 3D scans, on-device processing, instantly viewable in VR.

On top of that, Into the Scaniverse has over 50,000 splats for you to explore—several magnitudes more than any other 3D viewer out there—with new scenes showing up every day. And of course, you can add your own with the Scaniverse mobile app whenever you want. Connecting the apps so your uploads and likes show up under your profile takes less than a minute. Scan it, process it, upload it, and it’s right there for you to enjoy in VR.

Together, we’re building a new, fully immersive way to look at our world, giving you glimpses into different places, letting you get up close and personal like never before. And this is just the start of what we have planned.

There’s a whole planet out there to explore… when you step Into the Scaniverse.