Meta is rolling out tech that lets you capture a real-world space with a Quest VR headset so you can create a digital, photorealistic VR replica. The company calls the tech “Hyperscape,” and as part of a gradual rollout beginning today, users will be able to use the beta Hyperscape Capture app with their Quest 3 or Quest 3S to make the virtual copies. Initially, you’ll only be able to visit the rooms you’ve scanned by yourself, but Meta says that users will be able to visit rooms together by sharing a private link sometime “soon.”
Meta showed off Hyperscape as part of a demo introduced at Connect 2024 last year, and while it seems like the tech is still somewhat early, it’s clear that the company sees virtual recreations of real environments as a potentially notable use case for VR and its metaverse ambitions. (Though those ambitions have seemingly taken a back seat to AI as of late.) You can see a Meta-provided example of Hyperscape in the GIF below that recreates Gordon Ramsay’s home kitchen.
I toured some prescanned rooms at Connect 2025, including Ramsay’s kitchen. The rooms looked a lot like real-life rooms, and it was fun to get up close to details like food on a table or a stack of books. The illusion would break down if you got too close to things — text on a “paper” New York Times was readable, but sometimes a little smudgy — but overall, I was really impressed with the scans.
I also tried a brief demo of the capture app. Wearing a Quest 3 headset, I walked and looked around a room, and as I did, a virtual mesh started to appear over objects I was facing. After about a three-minute scan of the room, the app prompted me to move closer to objects. That made the mesh start to disappear, which was a clever way to show what I had “scanned” in detail. But I didn’t get to finish that part before a Meta rep ended the demo.
Meta says that after you complete a full scan, it’s uploaded to the cloud to process over the course of a few hours before you can experience the scan for yourself.
