Health and Safety Recommendation: While building mixed reality experiences, we highly recommend that you evaluate your content to offer your users a comfortable and safe experience. Please refer to the Health and Safety and Design guidelines before designing and developing your app using Passthrough.

Passthrough provides a real-time and perceptually comfortable 3D visualization of the physical world in the Meta Quest headsets. The Passthrough API allows developers to integrate the passthrough visualization with their virtual experiences.

Note: If you are just getting started with this Meta XR feature, we recommend that you use Building Blocks, a Unity extension for Meta XR SDKs, to quickly add features to your project.

Passthrough is rendered by a dedicated service into a separate layer. Because apps cannot access images or videos of a user’s physical environment, they create a special passthrough layer. The XR Compositor replaces this layer with the actual passthrough rendition.

By default, the Passthrough API creates this passthrough layer automatically (using automatic environment reconstruction), and submits it directly to the XR Compositor. Most of the time, you will use automatic environment reconstruction because you will not know the geometry of the user’s environment ahead of time.

You can override automatic environment reconstruction by using Surface-Projected Passthrough. This lets you define the geometry onto which passthrough images are projected. This approach leads to a more stable rendition of Passthrough in cases where the app has already captured parts of the user’s environment.

Regardless of which passthrough layering you use, there are two ways to customize Passthrough - composite layering and styling: