Room labels as a vocabulary list: building your own pack from the Quest's scene labels

Anyone who uses mixed reality seriously on the Quest 3 or 3S has been through Space Setup at some point. The Quest scans the room, generates a scene mesh, and then you mark out walls, doors, windows and furniture. Mixed-reality games read that information later: the sofa becomes cover, the table becomes a platform, the wall becomes a portal.

What hardly anyone notices: in that moment you’ve built a ready-made vocabulary list. Table, sofa, window, door, lamp, bed, plant. Nothing but concrete words for objects you see every day. This guide shows how to turn exactly that list into your own pack in LingFit, a language-learning app for iPhone, iPad and Android. The result: you learn the target language for the very room the Quest has already measured.

What Space Setup actually stores

A quick bit of tech, so we’re all using the same terms. During Space Setup, the Quest 3 and 3S capture the geometry of the room as a scene mesh, a three-dimensional network of surfaces. On top of that, you can label objects. Depending on the firmware version, the Quest offers categories such as table, sofa, bed, lamp, plant, screen, shelf or wall art, plus walls, doors and windows. Those labels are what mixed-reality games use as “semantics”: a game doesn’t just know there’s a surface there, it knows it’s a table.

The exact list of categories can change with updates. For our purposes that doesn’t matter. We simply take the words we’ve actually assigned in our own Space Setup.

Step-by-step guide

1. Open Space Setup. On the Quest, go to the section for the environment or Space Setup in the settings. The exact menu path can vary depending on the software version.
2. Go through the labels you’ve assigned. In the setup you see the marked objects in passthrough. Look at each label once.
3. Write the words down. Outside the headset, on your phone or on a piece of paper. Typically 8 to 15 words: wall, floor, ceiling, door, window, table, sofa, lamp, plant, shelf, screen, bed.
4. Add whatever’s in the room but has no label. Rug, curtain, radiator, socket, cushion. The pack can hold up to 20 words, so there’s room.
5. Open LingFit and create a custom pack. Choose the “from a word list” route.
6. Type in the words. One after another.
7. Have the chapter generated. That costs one credit. Every new account starts with a free credit, more are available as packs in the app, and purchased credits don’t expire. If generation fails, the credit is refunded automatically.
8. Rename the pack. For example “My Playspace”. It then appears in the “Yours” tab as a complete chapter with its own emoji.

What the list becomes

The result isn’t a simple stack of flashcards, but a chapter with the same exercise formats, audio files and images as the main course. For room vocabulary, some formats fit especially well:

• Image to word: You see an image and pick the matching word. That links the word to the object, not to the translation.
• Word builder: You build a word letter by letter. Good for words with tricky spelling, such as the German “Heizkörper” or the French “fenêtre”.
• Single-word listening: You hear a word and select it. With the slow button (snail icon) you hear the pronunciation slowed down.
• Fill in the blank: The word appears in a sentence. That way you pick up articles and prepositions along the way, such as “auf dem Tisch” or “neben der Tür”.
• Speaking exercise: You say the sentence out loud, and the recognised words light up green.

One detail that’s especially helpful for German or French: if you long-press a word bubble in a lesson, the tooltip shows several translations and the base form, with the article for nouns where the language has one. “Das Sofa”, “der Tisch”, “die Lampe”. Exactly the articles you tend to forget otherwise.

The bridge back into mixed reality

The real appeal of this pack lies in switching between phone and headset. Once you’ve practised the chapter for a few days, the next Space Setup or the next mixed-reality game has you seeing the room differently. The sofa in passthrough is also “el sofá” or “le canapé”.

A few ideas for using this without neglecting safety:

• Name things out loud during the next Space Setup. Say each object you mark once in the target language. It doesn’t take a minute longer.
• In breaks between MR rounds. Headset off, look around the real room, name every object. Then a lesson from the pack.
• Let the pack grow with the room. New piece of furniture, new label in Space Setup, new word in your saved words. Later you can combine up to 20 saved words into a new chapter.

Important: don’t look at your phone while playing, and don’t change Space Setup just to get one more word. Labels should describe the room accurately, because games rely on them.

Alternative: topic instead of word list

If you can’t be bothered with the typing, you can take the second route: a custom pack by topic. You enter a topic, such as “furniture and objects in the living room”, and choose a word level: Basic Words, Advanced Vocabulary, Ultra Advanced or Specialist Words. LingFit then suggests a vocabulary list that you can review and edit before the chapter is created.

The difference: the topic list is general. The list from Space Setup is personal. It contains exactly the things in your room, and no sideboard you don’t own.

A third option: photograph the list. If you’ve written the words on a piece of paper, you can take a photo of it, and LingFit reads the text and pulls out the vocabulary.

Which languages work?

LingFit currently offers 42 language directions. English speakers can learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Czech, Danish and Hungarian, among others. The full list is at lingfit.app.

Comfort and safety tips

• Only do Space Setup in good light. Scanning works better in an evenly lit room, and you trip over less.
• Notes outside the headset. Never look at your phone with the headset on your head while walking around at the same time.
• Confirm the boundary. After every Space Setup, check the boundary before starting a game.

Scaler’s take: Space Setup is the most boring chore in mixed reality, but it hands you the most personal vocabulary list imaginable along the way. Eight to twenty words, one credit, a finished chapter with image-to-word, listening exercises and articles. After that you no longer see the sofa in passthrough just as cover, but as a vocabulary word too.