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Facebook announced today that an upcoming update to the Quest Developer SDK will include experimental support for a Passthrough API that will allow Unity developers to build AR experiences and features in apps on Quest 2.
While Quest wasn’t initially released as an AR headset, its impressive camera passthrough ability has shown it can handle AR functions surprisingly well. In fact, if you use the passthrough view as your default background, the quest boundary and main menu will float over the background of your game space, making it an AR experience that has been available on the headset for quite some time. .
Until now, Facebook has kept the tools to build AR apps on the headset to itself, but today it announced it is unlocking the same capabilities for third-party developers as well.
Initially deployed as an “experimental” feature, the so-called “passthrough API” will be available in Quest Development SDK update v31. The Passthrough API is only available on Quest 2 at this time; it is not clear if Facebook plans to extend it to the original quest.
Facebook expects the new capabilities to enable a whole new class of apps on Quest 2 that take advantage of augmented reality in interesting ways. Here are some examples and explanations of the features developers can use:
Composition: You can combine Passthrough layers with other VR layers via existing blending techniques such as perforation and alpha blending.
Styling: You’ll be able to apply styles and tints to layers from a predefined list, including applying color overlay to the stream, rendering edges, customizing opacity, and posterization.
Custom geometry: You can render Passthrough images to a custom mesh instead of relying on the default style mesh, for example, to project Passthrough onto a flat surface.
While transparent AR headsets, like HoloLens and Magic Leap, give a much clearer (and colorful) view of the real world, passthrough AR headsets like Varjo XR-3 (and now Quest 2), tend to offer a lot of field. more immersive. more visible and convincing virtual images thanks to complete opacity control and the potential for perfect latency between real world imagery and virtual imagery. While Quest 2’s AR view is still quite low in resolution and in black and white, it is expected that future Facebook headsets will focus on improving the passthrough AR view.
While developers will be able to start experiencing augmented reality on Quest 2 with SDK v31 through Unity, support for other engines and the ability to actually release augmented reality apps for users is expected later this year.
With a device like Quest 2 full of cameras, it’s definitely worth thinking about privacy, especially now that third-party apps can use augmented reality capabilities. On this front, Facebook says that “applications that use the Passthrough API cannot access, display or store images or videos of your physical environment from the Oculus Quest 2 sensors” and that “the raw images from the device are processed on device ”, which means that the images that the camera sees are not sent to Facebook or to third-party developers.
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