How does Azure Spatial Anchors localize the headset when setting anchors?

Question

I'm just getting into Azure Spatial Anchors on the HoloLens and learning how different devices can anchor an object to the same location in physical space. Only point cloud data is used when the HoloLens is determining if an anchor should be placed in a specific physical location, correct? No GPS is used to determine where the user is located in the world? If this is the case, and I had one room in California and an exact replica in New York, and I upload an anchor placed on a couch in the California room, someone who downloaded the anchor in the New York replica room should have it attached to the same physical object, correct? I really appreciate you taking the time to read this. Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

Thank you for the question. You are correct on GPS not being used for HoloLens with ASA. However, GPS is an option for other platforms with ASA.
What this is meaning is the location data is actually used in conjunction to the spatial mapping performed from the device. Here are the links to the ASA location retrieval: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/spatial-anchors/concepts/coarse-reloc

Coarse relocalization is a feature that enables large-scale localization by providing an approximate but fast answer to these questions:

• Where is my device now?
• What content should I be observing? The response isn't precise. It's in this form: You're close to these anchors. Try to locate one of them. Coarse relocalization works by tagging anchors with various on-device sensor readings that are later used for fast querying. For outdoor scenarios, the sensor data is typically the GPS (Global Positioning System) position of the device. When GPS is unavailable or unreliable, like when you're indoors, the sensor data consists of the Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth beacons in range. The collected sensor data contributes to maintaining a spatial index used by Azure Spatial Anchors to quickly determine which anchors are close to your device.

So, the user space in different city but has same identical setup would not retrieve the anchors saved in the other city. Thanks, Nathan