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pon7's avatar
pon7
Protege
4 months ago

Is there any way to completely remove the boundary and make the play area unlimited size?

Say I have a very large area.  Think of an empty warehouse bigger than a couple football fields put together.  I want to create an AR application where my users can walk the entire area.

The problem I'm running into is when I start walking I eventually hit the wall of the boundary and the AR application turns off, similar to what happens then you walk through the boundary while in VR.  I get why this exists for VR but my users are in AR passthrough, so they can see their surroundings and are not going to run into anything.  I need some way to allow my users to continue walking beyond the boundary without turning the AR application off.

When I go into developer mode and disable the boundaries, A) that is only for development purposes (so I assume this means it won't work for a packaged application, and B) it turns off passthrough so AR is not an option.  When I try to manually create the boundary using the "suggested boundary", I will start walking in a direction and the boundary behind me follows me, keeping the total size of the play area about 30'x30'.  When I try to manually create the boundary using the spray paint lines, I hit an invisible "wall" while spray painting the boundary, and if I follow along the outer edge of this invisible wall with the spray paint, the area turns out to be a 30'x30' area.

Is there a way to accomplish what I want to do?  Is it possible create an AR application that allows users to walk around an area the size of 1-2 football fields?

Thanks.

5 Replies

  • Boundaryless Mode (and its false promise)

    You can disable the boundary in AR apps with the boundaryless manifest permission (Unreal boundaryless mode docs), but it doesn't actually do what you think it does :(

    Quest still has a second invisible boundary that is a 20 meter radius circle around the position where you either launched your app or last recentered. Walking out of this circle interrupts your application with this pop-up:

    I made a forum post asking Meta to remove this 'distance leash.'

    So, while you can remove the VR boundary, this only increases your playspace size rather than actually unrestricting it. There is no true 'boundaryless' mode yet. 

    Disabling 'Physical Space Features' should work.

    Disabling space features should only disable passthrough in the home menu and not in apps. Have you actually tried opening your app with `space features` disabled? Are you sure it doesn't work?

    Tracking large scale spaces

    Headsets will drift over time as they move around such a large space. I'd love to share my Unity package that supports tracking QR-like codes for robust positioning, but you're working in Unreal. I'm not sure if any Unreal-specific solutions yet exist, but it wouldn't hurt to search. 

    • pon7's avatar
      pon7
      Protege

      You, sir, are awesome.  Thank you for this response.   I'm heads down on another feature atm but you have given me a path forward when I circle back to this next week.  I'll make sure to post here with my results.  Thanks again.

    • djtaylor74's avatar
      djtaylor74
      MHCP Member

      Hi jtriveri,

      I was intrigued in this statement in your last reply, "...Unity package that supports tracking QR-like codes for robust positioning".  I'm also looking at Boundaryless Mode presently, and as well as the (annoying!) pop-up limitation I'm wanting to figure out better positioning techniques.  Is there any tips you can share regarding the use of QR type codes for that reinforcement of a location? 

      • jtriveri's avatar
        jtriveri
        Start Partner

        My current setup uses the Kabsch algorithm to anchor headsets to a space with multiple Apriltags . Kabsch gives me the 'best fit' between the scanned tag positions according to the headset and the real known positions. 

        I haven't yet split my implementation in my project into a clean stand-alone package, but you can see my implementation here where a 'master' headset determines the true tag positions and all other headsets calibrate to those tags. This uses a modified async version of this apriltag package for Unity as well as the scripts in the XRTemplate namespace from my project. 

    • pon7's avatar
      pon7
      Protege

      OMG, there's a 2nd boundary system when using Link!  What the...?  Why?  That seems crazy to me.  I'm a longtime VIVE user and you'd simply set your boundary once when you put on the headset, connect to your computer, and go to work.

      I had no idea there was a separate boundary system for Link.  I assumed the boundary controls in the main menu and the boundary controls in Link settings affected the same boundary.  Found this was not the case while troubleshooting another issue: in the main menu, I would set the boundary to roomscale and then go into Link and it would revery to stationary.  When I searched for the solution I found that you had to set Link's boundary system is roomscale as well.  When I went in to set the boundary settings within Link, that's where I found the button to disable the boundary.  And it works!

      But not I've ran into another issue, which you directly reference in your response to me: when I walk about 200' the tracking seems to give out.  All the virtual objects freeze and stop moving completely.  They just stay frozen in the viewport like they are attached to the headset.  It's kind of like the cache fills up and the headset says "Sorry, too much info!  I give up!".  Have you seen that before?

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