Meta's Horizon Hyperscape Demo seems to be rolling out beyond the US.
Horizon Hyperscape Demo was launched at Meta Connect last month as a US-only demonstration of six fully volumetric scenes on Quest 3, meaning you can move around them with positional tracking.
As brought to our attention by Dr Ray Holder, the app now runs in the UK, which I was able to verify, suggesting it may be available in other countries too.
David Heaney
Meta describes the Hyperscape as "powered by cloud streaming" and the scenes as "digital replicas", and says they were scanned using mobile phones, plus postprocessing in the cloud. It doesn't disclose the technology used to scan and render the scenes, but it appears to be Gaussian splatting, which is also available on Quest 3 in the app Gracia.
Because the scenes are rendered in the cloud, seemingly using Meta's long-in-the-works Project Avalanche VR streaming tech, the app starts by checking your internet connection speed and latency to make sure it's sufficient, but you can proceed even if the app deems it isn't.
I found the Horizon Hyperscape Demo to work fairly well on the 330 Mbps internet I'm currently using, though the streaming resolution felt too low, and I imagine it would look a lot better at higher resolution. It's unclear what the bottleneck here is though: an automatic resolution system, the scene capture quality, or something else?
UploadVR's Don Hopper trying Horizon Hyperscape.
At Connect, Meta said it plans to allow users to scan their own spaces at some point in the future, as is possible with Varjo Teleport in closed beta, but the company didn't provide a timeline for this.
If you're now able to access Horizon Hyperscape Demo in your country, let us know in the discussion section below.
