Monday, 4 August, 2025 UTC
Summary
You can now scroll Instagram Reels on a huge 3D virtual screen.
Back in May, Meta started rolling out automatic 3D conversion for all photos on Instagram when viewed in the Horizon OS app.
"Thanks to our AI view synthesis algorithms, we can transform the existing photos that show up in Instagram feed pixel by pixel—no fancy 3D cameras required. That means flat photos that weren’t originally captured in 3D will automatically be converted into an immersive format that gives 2D images a sense of depth when you view them on Quest", the company explained at the time.
Now, in recent weeks, the Instagram app on Horizon OS has started doing this for all videos too. You'll see videos, including Reels, in 3D by default.
Trying it out on my Quest 3, I found it works remarkably well, and feels very similar to spatial videos recorded on iPhone. The only quirks I saw were artifacts on the text in low-quality videos.
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The Instagram app on Quest.
Findings in the code of Horizon OS from Luna suggest that Meta plans to let you convert your local image files to 3D, as Apple's visionOS and ByteDance's Pico OS already let you, though neither yet supports this for videos.
That's not to say that Meta is alone in shipping AI 2D to 3D conversion for videos viewed in XR. Moon Player on Apple Vision Pro, for example, offers this feature for any videos, as does Viture's SpaceWalker app for Android.
The rapid improvement of AI view synthesis algorithms raises questions about the necessity of true hardware-level stereo capture for smartphones. iPhones capture spatial photos and spatial videos with a very narrow interaxial distance (the distance between the cameras), less than a third of human eyes. Thus, while 3D media captured with professional cameras still look noticeably better than AI synthesized 3D, the difference for iPhone captures is already close to non-existent.
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2D to 3D conversion on visionOS 2. Note that this is being replaced with the more advanced Spatial Scenes technology in visionOS 26.
Instagram is available for free on the Meta Horizon Store. Note that if you've just signed in to it for the first time, you may need to reboot your Quest to see images and videos in 3D.