Microsoft retired Azure Spatial Anchors on 20 November 2024. The service no longer accepts new anchors and existing anchors are not served, so this is a replacement rather than a migration in the usual sense: the cloud half of the system is gone and has to be rebuilt somewhere.
| Azure Spatial Anchors | MultiSet | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Retired 20 November 2024 | Active |
| Anchor persistence | Cloud service, now withdrawn | Persistent, stored in your map, survives re-scans |
| Deployment | Azure only | Cloud, private VPC, self-hosted, on-device |
| Platforms | HoloLens, iOS, Android | Unity, iOS, Android, WebXR, Meta Quest, Ray-Ban Display, ROS 2 |
| Map source | Device scanning at anchor creation | Any scan format you already hold |
| Accuracy | Not published post-retirement | Sub-5 cm |
The Azure model asked the device to scan its surroundings at the moment an anchor was created, then to recognise that patch of the world later. The map was implicit, built out of anchor neighbourhoods, and it lived in a service you did not control.
The replacement inverts that. Map the space once, as a first-class thing you own, then place anchors into a coordinate frame that already exists. That is a better arrangement for exactly the reason ASA's retirement hurt: the map is yours, so it cannot be withdrawn, and it can be re-scanned later without moving anything you authored against it.
In practice: the Unity project, the interaction code and the authored content carry over. What is replaced is the anchor creation and resolution calls, and the mapping step moves from runtime device scanning to a one-time capture you can do with a phone or with a scan the facility already has.
A common reason teams landed on Azure Spatial Anchors was that the rest of the estate was already on Azure, and a common reason the retirement was painful is that the replacement shortlist is mostly public-cloud SaaS.
The same MultiSet SDK works on MultiSet Cloud, in a single-tenant private VPC inside your own AWS, Azure or GCP account, on-premises, or fully on-device with no network call at all. If the original attraction was keeping spatial data inside your own tenancy, that requirement is met more completely now than it was before.
