Niantic's Scaniverse is now available as an app for Quest 3 and Quest 3S on the Horizon Store, not just WebXR anymore.
The Scaniverse mobile app for iOS/iPadOS and Android lets you scan real world 3D scenes for free, leveraging on-device processing. In December Niantic launched an Into The Scaniverse WebXR site to let you view them, and those created by others around the world, in VR via the Horizon OS web browser on Quest 3 and Quest 3S.
Now, Into The Scaniverse is also available as an app on the Horizon Store, supporting Quest 3 and Quest 3S.
Niantic claims Scaniverse has the world’s largest collection of Gaussian splats, with over 50,000 scenes from 120 countries. The VR interface lets you browse them on a 3D globe interface marking their capture location.
Scaniverse has been around for three years now, and originally used traditional 3D scanning techniques, leveraging and requiring the LiDAR depth sensor of iPhone Pro and iPad Pro models. Two years ago it was upgraded to work without LiDAR, leveraging advancements in computer vision depth estimation. And last year Scaniverse got its most significant upgrade yet: switching from a traditional 3D stack to Gaussian splatting.
Gaussian splats offer higher fidelity scans, with accurate lighting and reflections. And whereas previous Scaniverse scans only included one specific object, splats include a representation of the background - and this makes them ideal for viewing in VR.
Trying out Into The Scaniverse, I found that the quality of the subjects, the central objects being scanned, is very impressive for on-device scans, while the background is significantly lower detail than what you'd find in Varjo Teleport and Meta's Horizon Hyperscape Demo. But Varjo Teleport is $30/month, and Horizon Hyperscape is only a demo of six scenes, while Scaniverse is completely free. And while Varjo Teleport scans take between 30 minutes and 24 hours, Scaniverse completes in a matter of single-digit minutes, at least on a high end phone.
You can download the Scaniverse scanning app on the App Store for Apple mobile devices or the Google Play Store for Android mobile devices, and you can view Scaniverse splats on your Quest 3 or Quest 3S at the WebXR site or now with the Horizon Store app.
