Note, this is an entry by one of the hosts, will not take part of any wins :P
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Epic!! I'm sure you hear it a lot but your contributions to the Godot XR space are phenomenal. Keen to try this out when I get home.
I've been very curious about the room scan feature and would love to explore it for my next project. On that note, I have a quick question - the XR tools docs for the passthrough extension state - "For privacy reasons no access is given to the camera image."
I'm curious to know, is this a hard limitation imposed by the Meta SDK/API or can we hack around this? I was hoping to explore image post-processing and computer vision. I feel like that could be an incredibly visceral MR experience, however that wouldn't be possible without access to the image data.
Looking through discussions on Meta community forums, it sounds like this is more about politics than privacy. Android has had a robust app permission system since infancy...
bektasesref's comment in one thread hits the nail on the head - "Just think about the horror when anti AR people say to each other something like "Meta's new feature allows developers to spy on our own eyes, shame the devil!'"
Sadly yes, that is a hard limitation on most XR platforms. There is a lot of division on whether this is a good thing or not within the industry. Meta kinda started the trend and there is merit to the argument, everyone else followed suit We'll see if things change under market pressure. Apple has already swayed a little allowing access for business XR applications but not consumer applications (e.g. not for apps on the AppStore).
Understood. There's definitely merit to it and I imagine from a regulation standpoint, these HMD's are probably treated differently to traditional handheld mobile devices. With this in mind the restrictive stance makes sense until the public warms up to the tech and regulations are in place. It will be interesting to see if Meta and other XR platforms follow suit with the enterprise API.
This will be interesting! Passthrough API Overview | Meta Horizon OS Developers