And as a new wave of virtual reality sets draw people in, they’re bringing your real-world activities closer with them.
Next week, Meta will launch three free additions to its Quest headset lineup that shift the possibilities of what you can do the moment you pull one on: a unified TV-and-movies hub featuring premium formats; an artificial intelligence designed to generate entire worlds faster; and a capture mode that turns bits of your room into lifelike 3D space to revisit later.
All current Quest models get two, and the room-scanning feature is unique to the newer Quest 3 and Quest 3S.
Streamen leicht gemacht: Horizon TV auf Quest
Its new Horizon TV hub consolidates big services like Netflix, Prime Video, ESPN, Peacock, Hulu and Disney+ in one place so you don’t have to hop from app to app when you want to watch a show. It supports Dolby Atmos from day one, and the promised addition of Dolby Vision HDR matters if you like punchy contrast while enjoying spatial audio in a virtual theater.
Meta is also pushing 3D media and entertainment. Certain Universal titles, such as M3GAN and The Black Phone, will offer specially created immersive 3D effects for the headset. And after an earlier announcement from James Cameron’s Lightstorm Vision, Meta says it has exclusive 3D content in the works, including a clip set in the Avatar universe. It’s a declaration of intent: VR is going to receive premium studio-quality experiences, not just casual clips.
Functionally, that just codifies the way most Quest owners are already using it. Analysts tracking the industry, including IDC, have predicted that Meta leads more than half of the consumer VR market; and streaming continues to be one of its most significant non-gaming use cases.
- A hub to simplify life
- Advanced audio and HDR
- Reduces friction setting up and requires less time, so you can watch more
Create faster with AI: Horizon Studio on Quest
Horizon Studio is the generative AI editor for the Horizon Worlds creation toolkit. You say or type what you’d like — “a UFC-style octagon,” “a warm living room,” “an underwater reef” — and the system will draft up a starting scene, along with textures, audio and non-player characters that you can pluck at. Think of it as a co-designer that takes you to a playable prototype level in minutes, not hours.
For creatives, that means less focus on boilerplate assets and more on gameplay and art direction. For neophytes, it reduces the barrier to creating something worth sharing. The net will be more worlds for you to explore, faster iteration on events and social space content, and a shortcut around worlds that feel overtaxed by too many players or overly familiar to those who’ve outgrown a single handful of hubs.
3D scan your room: Hyperspace Capture on Quest 3/3S
With the Quest 3 and Quest 3S, Meta is adding Hyperspace Capture — a feature that uses vSLAM (visual simultaneous localization and mapping) to let you turn your physical space into a photorealistic 3D scene you can revisit whenever. The system works by treating the headset’s cameras as if they were time-of-flight sensors — a technique called Gaussian splatting inspired by recent computer graphics research — in which it samples your environment from multiple angles and creates a dense field of colored points representing what your room looks like.
These results are static (objects won’t move and dynamic lighting has restrictions), but the sense of presence is surprisingly vivid for the relatively short amount of time it requires. It’s more akin to standing inside a memory than flipping through photos. Early demos are reminiscent of spatial photos on high-end phones and headsets, but splatting can be far more continuous and lifelike in terms of parallax with less artifacting when you lean or peek around corners.
Why only the newer headsets? Quest 3’s enhanced sensors and compute help enable the optimized capture and reconstruction pipeline. You can expect the best results in brightly lit rooms with clean, flat surfaces, and it is worth noting that privacy gets thrown out the window as anything that’s captured by a pair of cameras can be recreated.
Why this upgrade matters for streaming and creation
VR needs two things to succeed: reasons for people to return and creators who can keep up. (All this is wired through the proper TV hub with Dolby formats to give Quest owners a nightly habit, not just a weekend novelty.) Generative tools cut down the lift for world builders, and this should in turn grow a catalogue of places to go and things to do. And room capture gives you a personal anchor — your own spaces are now destinations, not just backdrops.
It is also in line with the direction of the broader market. Organizations like the Entertainment Technology Center at USC have underscored surging interest in volumetric media, even as Dolby tries to keep formats consistent across all its devices. Meta pulling those threads into one update helps normalize VR as a general-purpose media device, not just a gaming add-on.
Availability and tips for getting started on Quest
The features will come to Quest headsets via a software update. As soon as your headset updates, Horizon TV and Horizon Studio will appear for all supported Quest models while Hyperspace Capture will come to Quest 3 and Quest 3S — restart your headset if you don’t see them, and then check for the update.
For best results:
- Use a stable Wi‑Fi connection for 4K streams.
- Pair high-quality headphones to truly appreciate Dolby Atmos; closed-back cans isolate better than the built-in spatial audio.
- Map rooms in evenly lit environments to reduce reconstruction noise.
Bottom line: this is one of those rare free updates that meaningfully expands what your Quest can do — watch more, build quicker and bring your real world into VR with a couple of minutes of scanning.