Discuss spatial computing on Apple platforms and how to design and build an entirely new universe of apps and games for Apple Vision Pro.

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Misaligned visionOS Simulator Home Position
Using Xcode v26 Beta 6 on macOS v26 Beta 25a5349a When pressing on the home button of the visionOS simulator, I am not positioned in the middle of the room like would normally be. This occurred when moving a lot in the space to find an element added to an ImmersiveSpace. How to resolve: restart simulator device. See attached the pictures of the visionOSSimulatorCorrectHomePosition and the visionOSSimulatorMisallignedHomePosition.
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Sep ’25
iOS needs to allow for background bluetooth scanning. I can't fully build my app.
iOS currently restricts background Bluetooth advertising and scanning in order to preserve battery life and protect user privacy. While these restrictions serve important purposes, they also limit legitimate use cases where users have explicitly opted in to proximity-based experiences. The core challenge is that modern social applications need a way to detect when users are physically present at the same location or event without requiring every participant to keep their app in the foreground. Under the current system, background BLE advertising is heavily throttled and can only transmit a limited payload, background scanning intervals are sparse and unpredictable, peer-to-peer proximity detection cannot be maintained reliably when apps are in the background, and Background App Refresh is non-deterministic, making any kind of time-based proximity validation impossible. A proposed enhancement would be to introduce an “Enhanced Proximity Permission.” This would allow developers to enable reliable background BLE advertising and scanning for declared time windows, such as a maximum of eight hours. It would also allow devices running the same app to detect each other’s proximity using ephemeral, rotating identifiers that preserve privacy, with clear user consent and prominent indicators whenever the feature is active. Unlocking this capability would open up new categories of applications. Live events could offer automatic attendance tracking at concerts, conferences, or sports venues. Retail environments could support opt-in foot traffic analysis and dwell-time insights. Social apps could allow users to find friends at festivals, campuses, or other large venues. Safety applications could extend to crowd density monitoring and contact tracing beyond COVID-era needs. Gaming could offer real-world multiplayer experiences based on physical proximity, and transportation providers could verify rideshare pickups or measure public transit flows automatically. Privacy safeguards would remain central. Permissions would be time-boxed and expire after an event or session. A mandatory visual indicator would be displayed whenever proximity tracking is active. A user-facing dashboard would show all apps granted enhanced proximity access. Permissions would automatically be revoked after a period of non-use, and only ephemeral tokens not permanent identifiers would be broadcast. The industry impact would be significant. With this enhancement, iOS could power the next generation of location-aware social platforms while maintaining Apple’s leadership in privacy through explicit user control and transparency. Current alternatives, such as requiring users to keep apps in the foreground or deploying dedicated hardware beacons, produce poor user experiences and constrain innovation in spatial computing and social applications. Can anyone from Apple consider this change? Having to buy iBeacons is brutal and means slower adoption. Please reconsider this for users who opt in.
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1.1k
Sep ’25
Ornaments in Presentations
We can add ornaments to popovers shown by PresentationComponent, but I’m not sure if we should. While working on the editor for entities in a Volume-based app, I had the idea to add ornaments to the presented views. The entire app exists inside a volume. A user can tap a item to present a popoverUI to edit it. This is displayed using the new PresentationComponent in visionOS 26. Ornaments have a new attachment anchor option this year: .parent(). .ornament(attachmentAnchor: .parent(.top), ornament: {...}) This works well in the Simulator. We can add ornaments around this popover view just like we would with a window. Unfortunately, when I run this on device I get a different experience. Any part of the ornament that overlaps with the popover content isn’t rendered correctly. Sometimes it entirely disappears, other times it becomes partially transparent. We could use content alignment to try to make sure the ornament doesn’t overlap the popover content. .ornament(attachmentAnchor: .parent(.top), contentAlignment: .bottom, ornament: {...}) This works sometimes–but not all the time. It’s not clear if this is a bug or not, because I’m not sure if we are even supposed to be able to use ornaments in this way. Here is my hierarchy: An app opens as a Volume Volume presenting a RealityView, with its own ornament using .scene() anchor Multiple Entities with Presentation Component show an edit view The view uses .parent() anchor to add ornaments. What makes me unsure is that other methods for drawing UI in RealityView don’t seem to work with ornaments. For example, if I add an attachment to show a view with the ornament–even when I use the .parent() anchor–the ornament is anchor to the volume, not the attachment view. So what do we think? Is this a rendering bug? Are ornaments intended to work with attachments and presentations?
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Aug ’25
[visionOS] How to render side-by-side stereo video?
I want to render a 3d/stereoscopic video in an Apple Vision Pro window using RealityKit/RealityView. The video is a left-right stereo. The straight forward approach would be to spawn a quad, and give it a custom Shader Graph material, which has a CameraIndexSwitch. The CameraIndexSwitch chooses between the right texture vs the left texture. https://i.sstatic.net/XawqjNcg.png The issue I have here is that I have to extract the video frames from my AVSampleBufferVideoRenderer. This should work ok, but not if I'm playing FairPlay content. So, my question is, how to render stereo FairPlay videos in a SwiftUI RealityView?
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Aug ’25
What's in Reality Composer Pro 26
That title would have made a great WWDC Sessions. Unfortunately, it seems like nothing is new in Reality Composer Pro this year. I've noticed at all versions of the Xcode Beta this summer have shipped with Reality Composer Pro version 2.0. There have been slight bumps in the build number. I haven't found any new features or seen any documentation to indicate that anything has changed. So the question is, what is the state of Reality Composer Pro? Should we continue to use this tool or start doing everything in code? A huge number of Sample Projects use Reality Composer Pro, so it seems like Apple is still using it even if they didn't update it this year.
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Aug ’25
How to mix Animation and IKRig in RealityKit
I want an AR character to be able to look at a position while still playing the characters animation. So far, I managed to manually adjust a single bone rotation using skeletalComponent.poses.default = Transform( scale: baseTransform.scale, rotation: lookAtRotation, translation: baseTransform.translation ) which I run at every rendering update, while a full body animation is running. But of course, hardcoding single joints to point into a direction (in my case the head) does not look as nice, as if I were to run some inverse cinematic that includes, hips + neck + head joints. I found some good IKRig code in Composing interactive 3D content with RealityKit and Reality Composer Pro. But when I try to adjust rigs while animations are playing, the animations are usually winning over the IKRig changes to the mesh.
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Aug ’25
Perspective problem
Hi, I called it "perspective problem", but I'm not quite sure what it is. I have a tag that I track with builtin camera. I calculate its pose, then use extrinsics and device anchor to calculate where to place entity with model. When I place an entity that overlaps with physical object and start to look at it from different angles, the virtual object begins to move. Initially I thought that it's something wrong with calculations, or some image distortion closer to camera edges is affecting tag detection. To check, I calculated the position only once and displayed entity there, the physical tracked object is not moving. Now, when I move my head, so the object is more to the left, or right in my field of view, the virtual object becomes misaligned to the left, or right. It feels like a parallax effect, but distance from me to entity and to physical object are exactly the same. Is that expected, because of some passthrough correction magic? And if so, can I somehow correct it back, so the entity always overlaps with object? I'm currently on v26 beta 5. I also don't quite understand the camera extrinsics, because it seems that I need to flip it around X by 180 degrees to make it work in deviceAnchor * extrinsics.inverse * tag (shouldn't it be in same coordinates as all other RealityKit things?).
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Aug ’25
FromToByAnimation triggers availableAnimations not the single bone animation
So, I was trying to animate a single bone using FromToByAnimation, but when I start the animation, the model instead does the full body animation stored in the availableAnimations. If I don't run testAnimation nothing happens. If I run testAnimation I see the same animation as If I had called entity.playAnimation(entity.availableAnimations[0],..) here's the full code I use to animate a single bone: func testAnimation() { guard let jawAnim = jawAnimation(mouthOpen: 0.4) else { print("Failed to create jawAnim") return } guard let creature, let animResource = try? AnimationResource.generate(with: jawAnim) else { return } let controller = creature.playAnimation(animResource, transitionDuration: 0.02, startsPaused: false) print("controller: \(controller)") } func jawAnimation(mouthOpen: Float) -> FromToByAnimation<JointTransforms>? { guard let basePose else { return nil } guard let index = basePose.jointNames.firstIndex(of: jawBoneName) else { print("Target joint \(self.jawBoneName) not found in default pose joint names") return nil } let fromTransforms = basePose.jointTransforms let baseJawTransform = fromTransforms[index] let maxAngle: Float = 40 let angle: Float = maxAngle * mouthOpen * (.pi / 180) let extraRot = simd_quatf(angle: angle, axis: simd_float3(x: 0, y: 0, z: 1)) var toTransforms = basePose.jointTransforms toTransforms[index] = Transform( scale: baseJawTransform.scale * 2, rotation: baseJawTransform.rotation * extraRot, translation: baseJawTransform.translation ) let fromToBy = FromToByAnimation<JointTransforms>( jointNames: basePose.jointNames, name: "jaw-anim", from: fromTransforms, to: toTransforms, duration: 0.1, bindTarget: .jointTransforms, repeatMode: .none, ) return fromToBy } PS: I can confirm that I can set this bone to a specific position if I use guard let index = newPose.jointNames.firstIndex(of: boneName) ... let baseTransform = basePose.jointTransforms[index] newPose.jointTransforms[index] = Transform( scale: baseTransform.scale, rotation: baseTransform.rotation * extraRot, translation: baseTransform.translation ) skeletalComponent.poses.default = newPose creatureMeshEntity.components.set(skeletalComponent) This works for manually setting the bone position, so the jawBoneName and the joint-transformation can't be that wrong.
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Aug ’25
Unexpected behavior when writing entities and loading realityFiles.
I have a simple visionOS app that creates an Entity, writes it to the device, and then attempts to load it. However, when the entity file get overwritten, it affects the ability for the app to load it correctly. Here is my code for saving the entity. import SwiftUI import RealityKit import UniformTypeIdentifiers struct ContentView: View { var body: some View { VStack { ToggleImmersiveSpaceButton() Button("Save Entity") { Task { // if let entity = await buildEntityHierarchy(from: urdfPath) { let type = UTType.realityFile let filename = "testing.\(type.preferredFilenameExtension ?? "bin")" let documentsURL = FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask)[0] let fileURL = documentsURL.appendingPathComponent(filename) do { let mesh = MeshResource.generateBox(size: 1, cornerRadius: 0.05) let material = SimpleMaterial(color: .blue, isMetallic: true) let modelComponent = ModelComponent(mesh: mesh, materials: [material]) let entity = Entity() entity.components.set(modelComponent) print("Writing \(fileURL)") try await entity.write(to: fileURL) } catch { print("Failed writing") } } } } .padding() } } Every time I press "Save Entity", I see a warning similar to: Writing file:///var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/1140E7D6-D365-48A4-8BED-17BEA34E3F1E/Documents/testing.reality Failed to set dependencies on asset 1941054755064863441 because NetworkAssetManager does not have an asset entity for that id. When I open the immersive space, I attempt to load the same file: import SwiftUI import RealityKit import UniformTypeIdentifiers struct ImmersiveView: View { @Environment(AppModel.self) private var appModel var body: some View { RealityView { content in guard let type = UTType.realityFile.preferredFilenameExtension else { return } let documentsURL = FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask)[0] let fileURL = documentsURL.appendingPathComponent("testing.\(type)") guard FileManager.default.fileExists(atPath: fileURL.path) else { print("❌ File does not exist at path: \(fileURL.path)") return } if let entity = try? await Entity(contentsOf: fileURL) { content.add(entity) } } } } I also get errors after I overwrite the entity (by pressing "Save Entity" after I have successfully loaded it once). The warnings that appear when the Immersive space attempts to load the new entity are: Asset 13277375032756336327 Mesh (RealityFileAsset)URL/file:///var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/1140E7D6-D365-48A4-8BED-17BEA34E3F1E/Documents/testing.reality/Mesh_0.compiledmesh failure: Asset provider load failed: type 'RealityFileAsset' -- RERealityArchive: Failed to open load stream for entry 'assets/Mesh_0.compiledmesh'. Asset 8308977590385781534 Scene (RealityFileAsset)URL/file:///var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/1140E7D6-D365-48A4-8BED-17BEA34E3F1E/Documents/testing.reality/Scene_0.compiledscene failure: Asset provider load failed: type 'RealityFileAsset' -- RERealityArchive: Failed to read archive entry. AssetLoadRequest failed because asset failed to load '13277375032756336327 Mesh (RealityFileAsset)URL/file:///var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/1140E7D6-D365-48A4-8BED-17BEA34E3F1E/Documents/testing.reality/Mesh_0.compiledmesh' (Asset provider load failed: type 'RealityFileAsset' -- RERealityArchive: Failed to open load stream for entry 'assets/Mesh_0.compiledmesh'.) The order of operations to make this happen: Launch app Press "Save Entity" to save the entity "Open Immersive Space" to view entity Press "Save Entity" to overwrite the entity "Open Immersive Space" to view entity, failed asset load request Also Launch app, the entity should still be save from last time the app ran "Open Immersive Space" to view entity Press "Save Entity" to overwrite the entity "Open Immersive Space" to view entity, failed asset load request NOTE: It appears I can get it to work slightly better by pressing the "Save Entity" button twice before attempting to view it again in the immersive space.
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Aug ’25
TextComponent on iOS/macOS pixelated when viewed from short distance
Hello, I've been tinkering a bit with TextComponent. Based on the docs it seems like this component should always render sharp and nice text, no matter how close the user gets: RealityKit dynamically adjusts the backing size to a value that results in high-fidelity text at its current location. And it does on visionOS, but on iOS and macOS the text gets pixelated when I get close to it, as if its just rendering it once as a plain image texture. Can anyone tell me if this is expected behavior or a bug? Here two screenshots for comparison (iPhone and Vision Pro): Thanks!
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Aug ’25
spatial-backdrop feature available yet?
In WWDC25 session What’s new for the spatial web, the presenter showed creating an immersive environment for a web page by adding to the page's HEAD section <link rel="spatial-backdrop" href="office.usdz" environmentmap="lighting.hdr"> My first attempt failed, and I am trying to track down why. Before I search all the potential failure paths, I wanted to ask the community, Is this feature available in the latest visionOS 26 beta? I haven't seen anyone talk about their use of the feature yet.
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Aug ’25