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Shared experiences in Unity

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A shared experience lets multiple users, each with their own HoloLens, iOS or Android device, collectively view and interact with the same hologram. Holograms are positioned at a fixed point in space through spatial anchor sharing.

Azure Spatial Anchors

Automated with World Locking Tools

As with local anchors, World Locking Tools can use a group of Azure Spatial Anchors to lock entire coordinate spaces relative to the physical world, rather than use individual anchors to lock individual objects. World locking the entire space not only provides an environment that's more conducive to precise layout, it's also more efficient in both developer time and runtime resources.

For further information and samples leveraging Azure Spatial Anchors to share coordinate systems across HoloLens, Android, and iOS devices, as well as persisting spaces across sessions, see the World Locking Tools documentation.

Manual configuration of Azure Spatial Anchors

Azure Spatial Anchors create durable cloud-backed spatial anchors that your app can locate across multiple HoloLens, iOS and Android devices. By sharing a common spatial anchor across multiple devices, each user can see content rendered relative to that anchor in the same physical location.

You can also use Azure Spatial Anchors for asynchronous hologram persistence across HoloLens, iOS, and Android devices. By sharing a durable cloud spatial anchor, multiple devices can observe the same persisted hologram over time, even if those devices aren't present together at the same time.

To get started building shared experiences in Unity, try out the 5-minute Azure Spatial Anchors Unity quickstarts.

Once Azure Spatial Anchors is set up, you can create and locate anchors in Unity.

Local anchor transfers

In situations where you can't use Azure Spatial Anchors, local anchor transfers enable one HoloLens device to export an anchor so that a second HoloLens can import it. This approach is not supported on iOS and Android devices, and provides less robust anchor recall than Azure Spatial Anchors.

Next Development Checkpoint

If you're following the Unity development journey we've laid out, you're in the midst of exploring the Mixed Reality platform capabilities and APIs. From here, you can continue to the next section:

Locatable camera

Or jump directly to deploying your app on a device or emulator:

Deploy to HoloLens or Windows Mixed Reality immersive headsets

You can always go back to the Unity development checkpoints at any time.

See also