Colocated mixed reality

When working together with multiple Meta Quest headsets in one physical space Arkio allows your headsets to be co-located. This makes the headsets aware of each other's position so these users can be aligned to their current physical position when gathered or anchored in Mixed Reality. Make your live presentations and tours around your designs more engaging by experiencing your models like a virtual maquette, or jump inside the model in mixed reality to blend the real world with virtual geometry. You can also switch to fully immersed mode and explore your models together in boundaryless mode.

Manage colocated groups

The colocation group can be managed from Meta Quest hardware using the latest version of Arkio. When you start a meeting you will see a co-located outline with the host and users that are successfully co-located. The host can manage who is co-located using manage group and + and - icons behind the users. This will make the devices search the same spatial anchors on the other devices nearby so they can align themselves and join the co-located group.

Quest users in the live meeting can also request to join or leave this co-located group using the top right button of this outline so invalid co-located groupings can be corrected by everyone.

Users who are not using a Quest device cannot join the same co-location group as point cloud sharing between Meta and other devices is currently not supported yet. Users that are not colocated will be gathered like normal meeting participants at the preferred front or back gathering location. If you are having trouble adding colocated users you can follow the troubleshooting steps at the bottom of this article.

When co-located a few things change for users in a meeting:

1) They are automatically muted among each other (grayed-out mic icon) to avoid hearing echoes from nearby people via Arkio. Users not in a co-location group will still be able to hear co-located users so they can collaborate. Co-located user microphones can be muted and unmuted like normal Arkio meetings.

2) When co-located users are gathered they will be aligned to their real-world position instead of gathered in front or back of a gathering user (you can set your default gathering preference in meeting settings)

3) When the host locks their model position in god scale or human scale the other co-located users will be locked in this position as well. This allows the users to see the same aligned model on the top of a table in a god-scale or human-scale mixed reality where the arkio scene is aligned to the real world for digital twin overlays or boundaryless exploration in virtual or mixed reality.

4) The saved human scale lock positions of a host will be shared with other co-located users in a meeting. They can teleport inside these locked positions similar to how they do this in a single user and get out of this locked position by teleporting or gripping the outside of the lock.

5) If the Host teleports into a locked position he/she can gather all other users to first align the colocated users to that position and then apply that locked position to them.

6) If a host has selected the auto-follow mode in meeting settings co-located users will automatically be aligned every time the host moves to a new position. If the host jumps into human scale locked position all the colocated users will first align to that position and also apply that lock to them.

Troubleshooting colocation issues

To allow the headsets to join the colocation group Point cloud sharing needs to be active on your Quest devices. You get a notification to enable this on startup of Arkio and you can change this in settings on your quest from the Device Permissions in Settings>Privacy and Safety

Your devices need to be able to share point cloud data between devices using Meta's point cloud sharing servers. You can make this easier for the device by walking two circles around your room (to let the headset recognize the floors behind objects like tables/chairs) A warning in the meeting panel or on your wristband will indicate if something is wrong with your point cloud data or if your tracking is not active. Once the spatial anchors are available and you are in the same meeting with other quest devices you should be able to add these devices to the co-location group.

Sometimes devices have difficulties finding the same point clouds due to old or invalid tracking data from physical spaces that the headset has mapped out before. A warning icon will show behind the username in the multiuser panel to indicate that the user is not able to join the same colocation group.

It can also happen that a colocation group can be joined without warnings but there is a misalignment between two or more headsets. Every time colocated users are gathered they will be offset due to conflicting misaligned anchors. These anchors can come from previously visited spaces like computer screens, tables or desks that have since been changed in your surroundings.

For the above cases, you can best "delete the shared storage" of your point-cloud data and "clear physical space history" from Settings>Privacy and Safety on all the headsets that are experiencing colocation issues. The headset will automatically rescan your space and after walking around your room a few times and rejoining the Arkio meeting your colocation alignment in Arkio should work better now.

Colocation best practices

There are occasions where the Meta's shared spatial anchors aren't shared correctly between meeting participants. You can try the following troubleshooting steps to make colocation groups work reliably: