Room scan for HAUNTED: setting up Space Setup so your walls, floor and ceiling play along

In HAUNTED: Are You Alone? your room is the level. Knocking comes from your walls, arms break out of your plaster, a hole opens in your floor, and some of it later hangs from your ceiling. For all that to happen where it’s supposed to, the game needs a good room scan. And you don’t create that in the game — you create it in Quest Space Setup.

We all know what a rushed scan looks like: a bookshelf becomes a wall, the floor height sits a few centimetres off, and the ceiling is missing in the corner. In plenty of MR apps you’d barely notice. In a game that deliberately plays your room’s surfaces, you very much do. This guide walks you through a scan optimised for HAUNTED.

What HAUNTED uses from your scan

According to the studio, walls, floor and ceiling become the play area, and any room size works. From that we can work out what matters:

• Walls: This is where most of it happens. Knocking, ghost hands, arms, blood splatter, a wall that breaks open into a graveyard.
• Floor: A hole that opens up, objects that stay put, and secret codes you draw on the floor with your finger or the tip of your controller.
• Ceiling: In Arm Cutter, arms come from above too from wave 3 onwards.

So a good scan means: clean wall surfaces, an accurate floor plane and a fully captured ceiling.

Before the scan: preparing the room

1. Lights on. Space Setup and tracking need a well-lit environment. Even room lighting beats a single bright lamp.
2. Clear the floor. Whatever is lying around now may end up in the scan as an obstacle.
3. Close the doors. An open door is a hole in the wall as far as the scan is concerned. Especially for a game that uses wall surfaces, you want a closed surface there.
4. Cover large mirrors. Mirrors can throw off tracking and the scan. A cloth is enough.
5. Close the curtains (optional): with strong backlight from a window, this helps tracking.

The scan: step by step

On Quest 3 and 3S you’ll find the entry point in Settings under “Physical Space”, and from there under “Space Setup”. Depending on your Horizon OS version, the path may vary slightly. HAUNTED also offers you “Scan a new room” at launch, which takes you straight into Space Setup.

1. Stand in the middle of the room and let the headset pick up the floor first. Then check whether the floor plane really sits on the floor and isn’t a few centimetres above or below it.
2. Look around slowly. On Quest 3 and 3S the headset captures the room automatically as a mesh (scene mesh). Move your head steadily, not in jerks. Look into the corners too.
3. Look up. The ceiling is easily forgotten. Sweep your gaze once across the whole ceiling, especially corners and alcoves.
4. Check the walls. After the automatic scan you’ll see the detected surfaces. Where a wall is missing or sits at an angle, adjust it.
5. Furniture as volumes. Large pieces like a wardrobe, bed or sofa should be detected or marked as objects, not as wall. That way wall effects land on real walls.

On Quest 2 and Quest Pro the scan works differently: there you largely trace walls and furniture by hand. Take the time to draw the walls correctly right into the corners and to set furniture up as its own boxes.

Typical mistakes and their consequences

Mistake	What can happen in the game
Shelf detected as wall	Effects land on the shelf instead of the real wall behind it
Floor plane too high	Objects and floor effects float, and drawing on the floor gets harder
Ceiling incomplete	Effects from above look cut off
Open door as a gap	A wall surface is missing where something could have happened
Furniture not marked	The room analysis doesn’t know about your obstacle

The consequences here are deliberately worded cautiously: the studio doesn’t disclose exactly how the game handles each individual inaccuracy. What’s certain is that a clean scan is the best foundation.

Furniture: obstacle or wall?

This is worth a moment’s thought. A free-standing wardrobe isn’t part of the wall, even if it stands right in front of it. If you mark it as its own object, the wall behind it stays available as a surface. If you let the scan capture it as part of the wall, the wall surface shifts forwards.

Our recommendation: treat large furniture as objects, but keep the wall surfaces in front of them as clear as possible. If you can, move a clothes horse or a floor lamp out of the way for the session so that at least two walls are clear over a large area.

Multiple rooms

At launch, HAUNTED shows all the rooms you’ve scanned. If you’ve set up a living room and a bedroom, you can choose, and you can switch rooms later in the menu. You always play in one room, though, not across the whole flat.

That’s handy for using different rooms for story and arcade. Important: each room needs its own clean scan.

After the scan: a quick function test

1. Check the boundary: Is the boundary active and does it sit sensibly with clearance from walls and furniture?
2. Turn once on the spot and watch for tracking dropouts.
3. Crouch down and take a quick look at the floor. If the floor sits right, the picture lines up.
4. Stretch your arms out, upwards too. Is there enough space?

Only then launch HAUNTED and pick your room.

When a new scan is due

A scan is a snapshot. As soon as the room changes, it’s out of date. These occasions matter especially for HAUNTED:

• New furniture or furniture moved around. A sofa that now stands in front of a previously clear wall changes the surface where effects can land.
• New decor on the walls. Large pictures and wall shelves are usually not critical for the scan, but free-standing screens or room dividers are.
• Seasonal decor. Especially at Halloween, pumpkins, fairy lights and props suddenly appear in the room. Either get them out of the play area or scan again.
• Tracking problems. If the headset no longer reliably recognises the room, a fresh scan is often the quickest fix.

On Quest 3 and 3S a new scan usually takes just a few minutes. That’s little compared with a session where effects land in the wrong place.

Comfort and safety tips

• Scan again if you’ve moved things around. A sofa shifted in the real room but still in its old spot in the scan is a trip hazard.
• Don’t disable the boundary. Not even in mixed reality. With jump scares you take steps you didn’t plan.
• Build in breaks. The scan itself is quick, the session afterwards is intense.

Scaler’s take: With HAUNTED, a careful room scan pays off as directly as in almost any other game, because walls, floor and ceiling really do play along. Five minutes of Space Setup with the door closed, the mirror covered and the ceiling fully captured make the difference between “an arm comes out of the wardrobe” and “an arm comes out of my wall”. More on the game in the Meta Horizon Store.