Two months after its launch, Meta Platforms is overhauling its Horizon Hyperscape Capture app, moving the rendering process from the cloud to on-device for lower latency and mobility. Hyperscape Capture, unveiled at Meta Connect in September, lets you use a Meta Quest 3 or Quest 3S headset to scan and generate a real-world 3D environment — like your office or living room — to share as a photorealistic VR replica. Rather than cloud-rendered captures that were accessible solely within the app, Hyperscape Capture can now generate a Hyperscape as a Horizon Worlds destination — with audio.

“You can feel present with friends in spaces that matter to you, no matter where in the world you each happen to be,” Meta explains in a blog post about the change, which is rolling out gradually. Those who’ve already captured Hyperscape worlds will still be able to access them via the Hyperscape Preview app for iOS and Android.

Capture is created leveraging the Meta Horizon Engine. “All you need is your Quest 3 or 3S headset, the Hyperscape Capture (Beta) app, and a few minutes — no expensive camera rig required,” Meta suggests.

“The Hyperscape scanning process requires between 5 and 10 minutes of walking around the scene while wearing the headset, and it’s followed by between 1 and 8 hours of processing on Meta’s servers, depending on the complexity of the capture,” explains UploadVR, noting that “while the initial processing is still done on Meta’s servers, Hyperscape worlds are rendered on-device in VR, via the Horizon Engine that also powers Quest’s new Immersive Home and Horizon Central.”

“Meta’s next-level metaverse push progressed a little more this week, with the addition of two new features that will … eventually enable you to speak entire VR experiences into existence,” is Social Media Today’s take on the developments, also featuring an update to Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM) process that includes SAM 3D, which uses still images to render digital 3D objects.

In a separate announcement about the SAM updates, Meta describes two new models: SAM 3D Objects for object and scene reconstruction and SAM 3D Body for human body and shape estimation.

So now you can re-create real-world environments in Horizon World as “the basis for an expanding array of VR experiences,” then use SAM 3D to “add in 3D objects, while Meta’s Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor also enables you to generate 3D environments using conversational AI, adding another element to the process,” Social Media Today summarizes.