Any mixed reality app on Quest can now disable the annoying VR-centric safety boundary.
Boundary, formerly called Guardian, is certainly useful in virtual reality so you don’t leave your playspace and bump into furniture and walls. But in most mixed reality apps it’s superfluous, since you can already see the environment around you, and downright annoying because it means you can’t utilize your full room as a playspace.
Since v57 of the Meta XR Core SDK select whitelisted developers have been allowed to disable this boundary. With v66, developers can now do it. Mixed reality. Fully immersive VR still requires the boundary, which makes sense for safety reasons given you can’t see your surroundings.
You may be thinking a developer could render a tiny slice of passthrough to trick the system to get rid of the boundary in almost-full VR. But while this technically might work, remember that Quest lowers the CPU and GPU clock speeds when passthrough is active, so this would come at a notable cost to performance.
Before Quest 3 launched
Quest 3 ‘Smart Guardian’ Room Scanning Setup Leaked
Clips appearing to show room scanning setup for Quest 3’s mixed reality and ‘Smart Guardian’ found in firmware:
suggested Meta would replace the boundary with something altogether different, a more intelligent system that showed furniture and walls as you approached them. This didn’t occur, at least not yet. But developers and mixed reality users will appreciate the removal of this annoying boundary.