Shared Sessions in Artificial Reality Environments

Aspects of the present disclosure relate to shared sessions in artificial reality environments. Some implementations provide for application-level co-location that uses an application programming interface to connect co-located users (i.e., a local group) within a particular application. Some implementations can detect co-located users using existing proximity detection technologies. The application can make a call to identify the co-located users, generate a shared session for the co-located users specific to that application, and share session data with the co-located users, which can include spatial anchors, scene data, guardian data, etc. Other implementations provide for system-level co-location that allows for frictionless travel between multiple applications. The system can make a session discoverable for co-located devices to join, and to share spatial anchors between them (and, in some cases, scene data and guardian data), without the applications themselves having to create the session and share anchors.