Into the Scaniverse

Travel & Exploration
3.3
79 ratings 24 reviews
early access
2025
February 25
game modes
• Singleplayer
player modes
• Standing • Sitting
compatibility
• Quest 3/3S
storage 0.3 GB

Travel the globe and dive into incredibly vivid 3D scenes, from famous landmarks to hidden treasures, made by everyday explorers. Or create your own 3D scans with your phone, then experience them instantly in VR.

Thousands of new perspectives, with a community spanning 120 countries adding more every day... all waiting to be discovered when you step Into the Scaniverse.

Download now for free!

  • Explore 3D scenes in VR, captured from around the world

  • Over 50,000 scenes in 120 countries, with more added daily

  • Zoom in to any point on Earth to discover new perspectives

  • Create your own 3D scans on mobile and view them instantly

comfort Comfortable
age rating13+ Teen
websitenianticlabs.com
developerNiantic Spatial Inc
publisherNiantic, Inc
connectionInternet required
app version0.9.0
languagesEnglish

Reviews 24

SFMike23 days ago
9

Scaniverse is Magical

Scaniverse has become my new obsession. Why just take a 2D photo of something when you can do a reality capture of the scene or object and view it later in full 3D? Traveling around the world viewing places through other's eyes is fantastic. Even though some scans are less than perfect this is kind of their charm as they turn sometimes into impressionistic dream like encounters that I find enjoyable.

I'm surprised there are so many negative reviews here as when captured properly your scans can be amazing. There is a slight learning curve though and I suspect too may people don't read the scanning hints and just haphazardly point and shoot. Reading the instructions, always a good idea. Also, Niantic continues to improve the app since it's inception so disappointed users should give it another try.

Andrew Wilson40 days ago
1

My New Favourite Hobby

Making gaussian splat scans has become my new favourite hobby since I discovered Scaniverse through launch of this VR companion app. It’s fascinating to see nearly photorealistic renderings of places around my neighborhood, then being able to virtually fly above, in, or around those places.

The VR app could benefit from some missing features present in the phone app:
-Selecting a person’s username to see a gallery of their scans
-Re-centering your view to the initial starting position
-Selecting a portion of the scan to quickly zoom in on it, the way double tapping works on the phone. The joystick movement speed is too slow when viewing large scans.

It would be nice to have the option to select a higher level of detail at the cost of performance. The VR versions of scans are noticeably less detailed than when doing the same scans on the phone app. I’d also like an option for smooth turning rather than only snap turning.

There are also some bugs. When viewing the My Splats section, the order of thumbnails is sometimes randomized when changing pages, instead of showing in order of upload date. It would help to have a refresh button on the My Splats section to avoid this issue. That would also help to avoid having to reload the entire app if I upload a new scan from my phone while the VR app is still running, as it seems that section doesn’t repopulate automatically, but rather only when you initially load the app.

These missing features and bugs are what is preventing me from giving it a five star review.

Jimmas44 days ago
4

Maybe it's too early?

The quality is very bad or it gets worse as we move and we don't really have a 360° either. Some scans are just black or... selfies? I don't know if there is a validation process. Also, I don't understand the concept, there are apps for visiting places in the world. How can this one make the difference?

Hari51 days ago
2

Fantastic to see Gaussian splats in vr

It’s so cool to see your own splats on the quest 3 natively. Obviously there’s some technical limitations but the cleaner scans really do look impressive. One issue is splat unresponsive for certain areas that aren’t optimized for Vr (such as your own splats occasionally). You can get around this by using higher cpu/gpu allocation in quest games optimizer (available on itch..io) or Niantic could change their app settings in future updates. Hopefully some optimizations to come as well. Very exciting stuff

Smancometh61 days ago

Total disappointment...

I see the developer tried a Google Earth
knockoff but such bad imagery.

kaszawanna91 days ago
1

Needs work

It’s great that you can easily view your 3D scans in VR and explore a wide variety of community-created ones. Naturally, you'll come across some low-quality scans - that's to be expected - but it would be nice to have better filtering and searching options to sort through them. The overall functionality is fairly limited, and there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement. Giving my experience I would give it less stars but I see that the devs are currently working on it so I want to keep them motivated. Finally the app is free, so it’s just worth checking out.

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