Into The Scaniverse: Your splats on Meta Quest for the first time

Use the free Scaniverse app on your phone to scan, process, and upload a 3D photo, and then see it instantly on your Meta Quest. The whole process takes less than five minutes.

From fantasy to reality

Navigate a balloon across a globe inspired by cartography of years gone by. Find spinning crystals that hint at scenes to explore. Then hop into one that strikes your fancy—and into a futuristic way to see modern-day scenes on every inhabited continent.

A global library of cool things to see

Every place on the Scaniverse map is there because someone found it interesting, from rock formations to architectural masterpieces to a giant flamingo in an airport. Where will your curiosity take you?

A true 3D experience for 3D photos

Gaussian splats accurately represent reflection, transparency, and other lighting dynamics from various angles like no other format. Windows, water, metal, and other reflective and translucent materials look particularly realistic.

In beta as a web app

Into The Scaniverse is a beta WebXR experience that runs in the browser, and 3D Gaussian splats are a very new technology. We’ve developed a process for optimizing user-created splats that balances visual quality with responsive rendering. We are working on bringing the full magic of splats to the Meta Horizon Store for Quest 3 and 3S in future releases.

FAQs

Important things to know about using this beta experience

It is currently available on Quest 3 and Quest 3S. Stay tuned for expanded support to other VR platforms.

It's available on the Meta Quest Browser at intothescaniverse.com!

We'll be launching it as an app in the Meta Horizon Store in early 2025.

Gaussian splatting is a new technique for representing real-life scenes in 3D.

It can model the world with amazing detail and fidelity, accurately capturing not only the geometry of the scene, but also lighting and reflections. Best of all, Gaussian splats can be created automatically from scans captured with your smartphone by leveraging the latest advances in machine learning.

Learn more about Gaussian splats.

Scaniverse is a free app for 3D scanning. It’s the first and only to offer on-device Gaussian splat processing, and connects to a global map that hosts the world’s largest collection of splats.

It’s available for iOS and Android

Note: currently, Into The Scaniverse only supports splats made on iOS Scaniverse.

No, you do not. You can navigate the map and explore the full collection without logging in. However, you must log in to like splats or to see your own splats, and to log in you must first be logged in on the Scaniverse app on your phone.

Yes! You use the Meta Quest browser to access the web app, but once launched, the WebXR experience launches a fully immersive experience.

Red pins mark splats uploaded by individual Scaniverse users. Blue pins are for community scans, which are compiled from photos taken by people recording point-of-interest information for other Niantic programs such as Wayfarer.

If you log in, you can access all splats you have uploaded, including those that are unlisted or not on the map. Find them in your Profile.

Without logging in, you’ll have to have uploaded them to the public map and then navigate to the location.

  • After completing the tutorial, activate your Profile from the filters list on the right of the basket. You’ll see a connection code.

  • Open Scaniverse on your iOS device, view your Profile, go to the … menu, press Authorise Meta Quest and enter the connection code. (Note that Android does not yet support Meta Quest connection.)

  • Back in Into the Scaniverse on your headset, the profile panel will confirm the link and you will now see a list of splats you have shared to the map or uploaded unlisted.

Some splats that were shared to the Scaniverse map from Android users by early December 2024 have been included in the WebXR map. Soon, Android users will be able to view splats they’ve taken since then in Into The Scaniverse.

Stay tuned for more details.

Yes, you can save locations by “liking” the splats. You will need to be logged in with a Scaniverse account.

To achieve real-time responsive performance, we developed a series of splat optimization techniques. Visual fidelity is generally sharper with nearer and smaller objects, while the backgrounds are less detailed than what can be seen on a phone or in a browser.

Also, Scaniverse 4.0.4 on iOS optimizes splats for Into The Scaniverse during original processing, leading to improved quality compared to previously uploaded splats that we have reprocessed on the server.

Please visit the Scaniverse Community section to share your thoughts. Your input will really help as we prepare to launch a native Meta Quest app.

This is due to your splats being processed with older Scaniverse versions.

If you update Scaniverse on your iOS device and reprocess and re-upload the splat, you'll have a VR-optimized version ready for you in Into The Scaniverse.