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Azure Spatial Anchors (ASA) will be retired on November 20, 2024. Learn more.

Spatial Anchors

Build apps that map, share, and persist 3D content.

Build cross-platform mixed reality applications with spatial context

More easily build rich immersive 3D applications and experiences that map, persist, and restore 3D content or points of interest at real-world scale.

Persist and Share 3D Content

Accelerate mixed reality app development by eliminating the difficult task of creating and restoring persistent, accurate digital anchors

Operate at Real-world Scale

Spatial Anchors has a proven ability to operate at global scale persisting and restoring millions of 3D objects

With the Security and Reliability of Azure

Ensure that your 3D content is rendering safely and reliably by leveraging Azure, the world’s computer

Contextually integrate IoT data

Connect your digital business data to your real-world workflows in facility management, manufacturing, and retail. Put real-time data at the fingertips of your employees, enabling them to make better, faster, and more informed decisions.

Workers in a factory wearing HoloLens devices viewing data together
A family sitting around a dining table having a conversation and using a laptop

Create massive multiplayer games in the real world

Bring the best of mobile gaming and mixed reality together. Spatial Anchors enables players to find nearby content, share and play mixed reality experiences in a real-world location, and persist games and puzzles for discovery on later days, weeks or months. Build experiences such as Minecraft Earth, holographic scavenger hunts, or digital escape room puzzles.

Enable collaborative experiences across platforms

Share mixed reality content on all the devices that work best for your solution, for scenarios like training and design review. Spatial Anchors supports HoloLens devices, ARKit-enabled iOS devices, and ARCore-enabled Android devices. Build your apps using Unity or your favorite native SDK for the devices you choose to support.

A person sitting in their living room using a tablet with mixed reality to view what a product would look like in their home

See how it works

Build multi-user, cross-platform apps. Create persistent spatial anchors in the real world and attach digital content to those anchors. Enable wayfinding. With Spatial Anchors, you have all of these capabilities at your fingertips. Watch them come together in a common scenario—architecture design review.

An illustration of a HoloLens and tablet viewing an AR rendering of a home

Comprehensive security and compliance, built in

Get started with an Azure free account

1

Start free. Get $200 credit to use within 30 days. While you have your credit, get free amounts of many of our most popular services, plus free amounts of 55+ other services that are always free.

2

After your credit, move to pay as you go to keep building with the same free services. Pay only if you use more than your free monthly amounts.

3

After 12 months, you'll keep getting 55+ always-free services—and still pay only for what you use beyond your free monthly amounts.

Trusted by companies of all sizes

Documentation, training, and resources

Tutorials

Get started building apps with step-by-step guidance from Microsoft Learn.

Documentation

Start using Spatial Anchors with our documentation.

Solution architectures

Frequently asked questions about Spatial Anchors

  • Mixed reality is the result of blending the physical world with the digital world. It adds interactive holograms to your real environment. Holograms are objects made of light and sound that appear in the world around you and obscure what's behind them as if they're real. Using artificial intelligence, holograms in mixed reality respond to commands and interact with real-world surfaces in real time.

  • Across augmented reality (AR) platforms, "anchors" are a common frame of reference for enabling multiple users to place digital content in the same physical location, where it can be seen on different devices in the same position and orientation relative to the environment. With Spatial Anchors, you can add anchor persistence and permissions, and then connect anchors in your application so that your users can find nearby content.

  • Spatial Anchors offers platform support for Unity, ARKit, ARCore, and UWP. Create your first app using quickstart templates for HoloLensUnityiOS, and Android.

  • Spatial Anchors supports all HoloLens devices. Today we offer documentation support for HoloLens Development Edition and HoloLens Commercial Suite, and documentation for HoloLens 2 is coming soon. You can also use this service in apps running on iOS-based devices supporting ARKit, and Android-based devices supporting ARCore.

    Learn more

  • You can go to the Azure Portal, select Spatial Anchors Resource, select "Metrics" tab under Monitoring Section (Left hand navigation), and then select Anchors Queried in the chart.

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