Decart XR, a free app you can sideload on your Quest 3, lets you reskin a 2D slice of your real-world view using generative AI.
The Decart XR client itself is open source, with the code publicly available on GitHub, or you can download the latest build precompiled from SideQuest.
It leverages the Horizon OS passthrough camera access capability, if you grant permission, sending frames from one of your headset’s forward-facing color cameras to Decart’s server-side AI style transfer models and superimposing the output in a rectangular segment of your view.
There are two available modes in the app: Warp the World and Swap Your Friend.
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Footage of Decart XR captured by UploadVR’s Don Hopper.
Warp the World is the main attraction here, leveraging Decart’s Mirage “world transformation model” to reskin the view in front of you to one of 61 premade prompts.
The Swap Your Friend mode, on the other hand, uses Decart’s Lucy model to reskin people you’re looking at, akin to some of the advanced filters you can find in apps like Snapchat, with 15 premade prompts.
You can also use your voice, via speech-to-text, to enter a custom prompt for either mode.
Trying out Decart XR on a Quest 3 in the UK, I found it to have extremely noticeable latency, with the view lagging behind my head movement by around a second, and poor image consistency, with pulsing and warping reminiscent of early AI video models.
The fact that Decart XR is 2D also means that it doesn’t really feel like it’s changing your real view – it’s more akin to someone holding up a giant tablet in front of you.
Still, Decart XR is a fascinating early look at the basic concept of AI reskinning your view. One day, when it can be done with much lower latency, wider field of view, and in 3D, I can see how it could be a key use case for XR headsets. Today, when getting work done in a headset or watching a movie, you choose between a VR environment or passthrough as your background. What if you had a third choice: your home reskinned to look like a scene straight out of your favorite movie, TV show, or game? We could be just a few years away from that being a possibility.
