Mac spatial preview feature: Supported with Blender?

Spatial Computing 3D Content
aboyan OP
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This post is from the Activity 3D Content Q&A.

Hello! I am relatively new to dev for Apple Vision Pro, however I have owned one since launch and love it. When I heard that we were going to be able to preview real-time, 3D models from the Mac I couldn’t believe it! This is one of my major workflows and I have been using 3rd party workarounds (that don’t work well).

My question is, is there any word on supported 3D modeling apps like Blender or Cinema 4D? Or will there be a way to implement this preview feature with any app via a protocol? Any documentation would be really helpfu!

Thank you, and continue the great additions to Apple Vision Pro!

Answered by Vision Pro Engineer in 892720022

Hello there! Great that you are trying out the Vision Pro.

There is actually a new framework for doing exactly what you describe called "Spatial Preview". It is integrated in macOS27 in Preview.

So if you have a .usdz file from one of those apps, you can open it in Preview in the beta and share with your Vision Pro! Also as a slight aside, if you have some 3D model exported from one of those apps, Preview has some great 3D editing capabilities now.

More info on that in the Spatial Preview Framework overview

In there you can see an example of it integrated to Cinema4D. Blender or other 3D applications would be other great candidates for using this to bridge to the Vision Pro.

In that link you should find more explanation and example code for doing so. Let us know if you have more questions!

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Vision Pro Engineer OP
Apple
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Hello there! Great that you are trying out the Vision Pro.

There is actually a new framework for doing exactly what you describe called "Spatial Preview". It is integrated in macOS27 in Preview.

So if you have a .usdz file from one of those apps, you can open it in Preview in the beta and share with your Vision Pro! Also as a slight aside, if you have some 3D model exported from one of those apps, Preview has some great 3D editing capabilities now.

More info on that in the Spatial Preview Framework overview

In there you can see an example of it integrated to Cinema4D. Blender or other 3D applications would be other great candidates for using this to bridge to the Vision Pro.

In that link you should find more explanation and example code for doing so. Let us know if you have more questions!
AdrianSch OP

For anyone landing here with the same question: now that macOS 27 and visionOS 27 are out, I built a small open-source tool that does this for Blender. It's free and open-source.

https://github.com/AdrianDot/BlenderSpatialPreview

How it works: A Blender add-on exports the current scene to USD and passes it over a local socket to a small macOS app. The app opens the file with USDKit and hands it to a USDPreviewSession. You press 'Send to Vision Pro' in Blender, and it will reports whether the headset actually received the scene. Nothing needs to be installed on the Vision Pro.

Current limitations (it's a prototype): It sends one frame per press, with no live editing or animation. Materials support base color, normal, roughness and metallic.

One thing to mention: Heavy scenes sometimes arrive as a small placeholder cube, and one oversized object can take the rest of the scene down with it. The exported USD is valid in these cases, so the failure seems to happen during Apple's optimization step.

@Vision Pro Engineer: is there any guidance on what determines when the optimizer falls back to a placeholder (vertex count, texture memory, mesh connectivity)? Knowing that would let the add-on warn users before they send.