Jul 23, 2021

Mixed Reality with Passthrough

Oculus VR

Today we’re excited to introduce Passthrough API Experimental—a way to build and test apps that seamlessly blend the real and virtual worlds and open up new possibilities for mixed reality experiences. Available in our upcoming v31 SDK release, Passthrough API Experimental will allow you to create new experiences for:

Productivity: Enable users to collaborate with a remote team of co-workers or friends through virtual monitors, while accessing their physical keyboard and desk.

Gaming: Create games that blend the excitement of a virtual world into the comfort and familiarity of the real world, like zombies hiding in your living room.

Co-located Social Presence: Allow users to be both engaged in your virtual content and able to interact with people and pets in the same room, at the same time.

Passthrough API Capabilities

With this experimental release, you’ll be able to customize the look and feel of Passthrough within your app, including:

Composition: You can composite Passthrough layers with other VR layers via existing blending techniques like hole punching and alpha blending.

Styling: You’ll be able to apply styles and tint to layers from a predefined list, including applying a color overlay to the feed, rendering edges, customizing opacity, and posterizing.

Custom Geometry: You can render Passthrough images to a custom mesh instead of relying on the default style mesh—for example, to project Passthrough on a planar surface.

The Passthrough API Experimental will be available for Unity developers in our upcoming SDK release, with support for other development platforms coming in the future. This experimental API allows you to start building and testing Passthrough experiences on Quest 2. The production version of Passthrough API is targeted for later this year, and at that point you’ll be able to ship these experiences to your users.

Passthrough and Privacy

We built Passthrough API with privacy in mind. Apps that use Passthrough API cannot access, view, or store images or videos of your physical environment from the Oculus Quest 2 sensors. This means raw images from device sensors are processed on-device.

We’re excited to see all the mixed reality experiences you build with Passthrough! Additional details, samples, and documentation will be available to developers with our upcoming SDK release. Please let us know what you think and share your feedback in the developer forums⁠.

Mixed Reality with Passthrough

Passthrough API Capabilities

Passthrough and Privacy

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