Meta's Hyperspace: Revolutionizing VR with Real-World Scanning and AI-Powered Creation

Meta's Quest Headsets Can Scan Your Home Into VR. The Results Are Stunning

Nearly 20 years writing about tech, and over a decade reviewing wearable tech, VR, and AR products and apps I stood in Gordon Ramsay's absolutely lovely kitchen and stared at the Smeg toaster on his polished counters. I admired the windows to the garden, the jukebox in the corner and the adjoining open living room. I tried to walk in the living room and hit a VR barrier. That's where the scan ended. Gordon's home was a Quest-made 3D scan, a still-life of his lovely LA abode. I almost felt like I could sit down in a chair and wait for him to walk into the room, brandish a soufflé... and yell at me. Meta previewed Hyperscape, a Gaussian Splat AI toolset for creating walkthrough 3D scans of real spaces, last year at Meta Connect. This year, the app is going live as Hyperscape Capture, announced at this year's Meta Connect conference. Any Quest 3 and Quest 3S owner can use it. With the headset's cameras, you can walk around and scan your space in minutes. Hours later, you'll get a result that should, hopefully, feel as amazing as the scans I tried. Gaussian splatting, a technique for 3D scanning of spaces, isn't new. Many companies already have apps and tools that showcase impressive scans, but the process of making these scans is often awkward, requiring patience and either your phone or specialized equipment to capture them. Meta's app impressed me because the final results I previewed -- a pastry shop in California, Happy Kelli's Croc room (there were lots of Crocs), and Chance the Rapper's studio, which had some wild full-size furry characters in it -- felt as real as the pass-through video quality on the Quest 3's cameras. These captures are still-lives, though. Nothing moves. And right now, the Capture app just allows private viewing of your captures. But Meta's next plans are to open up Horizon Worlds to upload personal spaces there, so avatars can visit and interact inside them. It's a possible stepping stone to something feeling like telepresence, especially when Meta evolves its avatars to be as realistic as Apple's personas, featured in the Vision Pro headset. It's something Meta's shown off in prototypes for years, but isn't available yet. The captures I experienced felt like snapshot living memories, more spatial than Apple's own spatial photos. And I wonder when Apple, and others like Google, will enable similar tech for their own VR devices. Right now, Meta enabling this level of 3D scanning quality on a headset as low as $300 feels like a bit of magic. It's also one of the few new things Meta's announced for VR at an otherwise very glasses-focused event this year.

Meta's Hyperspace lets you scan the real world and turn it into the Metaverse -- and create anything you want with new AI tools

Plus, new VR games and streaming movie options from Blumhouse Smart glasses may be all the rage at Meta Connect 2025, but some interesting things are happening in the Metaverse. The company announced a new tool called Hyperspace that can bring real spaces into the metaverse. Hyperspace Capture uses cameras on your Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S headset to "capture" your real-world space in minutes. It can then create a "true-to-life" digital replica that you can visit. "This is the first step in enabling our vision for photorealistic social teleportation," Meta said in a press release. Hyperspace is in beta and is rolling out gradually to Quest 3 and Quest 3S owners, aged 18 and up only, starting today. Meta showed off how the scanning works with rooms from celebrities like Chance the Rapper's living room and Gordon Ramsey's kitchen. Once you have access, you should be able to scan your own physical space. Meta does not mention if you can capture outdoor spaces and all of the provided examples are only of interior rooms. The company also said that you won't be able to visit other people's replicas yet, though that feature is coming soon. But if you have a Quest headset, you can check out the Hyperspace world,s including Chance's studio or The Octagon at UFC Apex in Las Vegas. Beyond Hyperspace, Meta is introducing two platforms to help developers and creators build games and worlds. "Our vision for the future is a world where anyone anywhere can imagine a character, a scene, or an entire world and create it from scratch," a press release reads. Meta's Horizon Engine is meant to provide better graphics and faster performance for devs to "easily generate nearly infinite connected spaces with realistic physics and interactions." Meta says it was built from scratch and allows for greater concurrency so that up to "5x more people" can enjoy a single space than Meta's previous engine was capable of supporting. Provide examples are giving very early World of Warcraft. You'll mostly see this support in places like the new Arena for concerts or the redesigned Horizon Central hub. The other tool, Meta Horizon Studio, is an editor and hub for creators. It comes with generative AI tools that can generate audio, textures, TypeScript, skyboxes and more via text prompts. Meta says it will soon add agentic AI assistants that will stitch tools together to make creating even faster. The goal is get people build gaming worlds in minutes rather than days or months. "It will dramatically lower the barrier to entry for creation without lowering the ceiling of what's possible," Meta said. Meta is launching new entertainment hub called Horizon TV. To start, Disney Plus is coming to the hub. Additionally, Meta is partnering with Universal and Blumhouse to bring you horror movies like M3GAN and The Black Phone with "immersive special effects." Over the summer at showcases like Summer Games Fest and GamesCom some VR titles were announced for the the Meta Quest VR headsets. The biggest title was probably Marvel's DeadPool VR. But other titles are coming as well including ILM's Star Wars: Beyond Victory and Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. Demeo is one of the best VR games for those who like tabletop RPGs. All of these games are coming this fall.