Spatial Anchors Overview

Spatial anchors are world-locked frames of reference that you can use to position content. They are transforms that represent fixed physical locations in the real world.

You can use spatial anchors to enrich the user experience in many ways, such as placing virtual signs on real furniture or creating spawn points on real windows for virtual characters to fly through.

A spatial anchor is a world-locked frame of reference. It represents a fixed position and orientation in the real world. You create a spatial anchor at a specific 6DOF pose and then use it to drive the transform of your virtual content.

Saving a spatial anchor can involve two different types of storage:

Note that once you have saved a spatial anchor in local or cloud storage, you need its UUID to load it. You must save the spatial anchor UUID to a separate location to refer to its anchor in a future session.

When you destroy a spatial anchor, you remove the spatial anchor from the user’s experience. Any virtual object that was using the spatial anchor remains, though its transforms will no longer be driven by the spatial anchor, so it is no longer locked to its previous real-world location.

Destroying a spatial anchor does not remove the spatial anchor from local or cloud storage. If you no longer need the anchor, you should also erase it from all storage.

Note that you only ever need to store spatial anchors to the cloud if you need to the share the anchors to another user. Otherwise, the parameter is optional and defaults to local storage for loading the anchor at a later stage.

A spatial anchor can be erased from local or cloud storage. This does not affect its existence in the user’s experience, but it means the spatial anchor will not be available in future sessions unless you save it again before the session ends.