What’s new in visionOS 26
Dive into the latest key technologies and capabilities.
Volumetric APIs
New volumetric features in SwiftUI make your app feel even more immersive. With depth alignments added to existing layouts, new tools for layout aware rotations, and 3D support for many SwiftUI modifiers, you can create richer 3D layouts in the same familiar way as 2D UI. With UI presentations, you can enable transient content like alerts, sheets, menus, and popovers inside and on top of volumes. With Dynamic Bounds Restrictions, your app can blend even more seamlessly with the real world by rendering outside your app’s bounds.
Objects can now be rotated even more intuitively with people’s hand movements, and you can apply this behavior to objects within your app with SwiftUI, RealityKit, or Quick Look APIs.
A new suite of SwiftUI, RealityKit, and ARKit APls deepen the integration between these frameworks. The Unified Coordinate Conversion API makes moving views and entities between scenes straightforward — even between views and ARKit accessory anchors. RealityKit’s Entity and its animations are observable, allowing them to be used directly in SwiftUI views. You can write your gesture handlers in SwiftUI, and attach those gestures directly to RealityKit entities. ViewAttachmentComponent lets you declare your UI inline with the rest of your RealityKit code. And Model3D can now do more, like switch between configurations defined in your models.
RealityKit has been enhanced so your apps can blend even more seamlessly with the real world. Environment Occlusion enables virtual objects to be occluded by static, real world objects. And, the new MeshInstancesComponent lets you efficiently draw numerous and unique variations of an asset.
Share experiences nearby
Shared experiences in visionOS become even more versatile with the ability to share Vision Pro apps and objects with people together in the same room.
Your existing SharePlay apps automatically work, with no additional code. ARKit has added support for shared world anchors — making it possible to precisely anchor shared content to the room. You can move, resize, and snap apps and content to your surroundings during a SharePlay session. And with Quick Look, you can manipulate, scale, and hand off virtual objects to one another, just like physical objects.
Personas in visionOS 26 undergo a dramatic transformation with improved detail to hair, eyelashes, complexion, and more, as well as expressivity that reflects you more naturally and realistically.
Widgets and persistent apps
Persistence
Part of the magic of spatial computing is its ability to seamlessly blend digital content with the physical world. With visionOS 26, apps and Quick Look content can now be aligned to physical surfaces and “locked” into place, providing a new way to utilize existing spaces.
This locked content can now persist, reappearing in the same place, even after restarting your Apple Vision Pro. New Persistence APIs allow you to specify what content can be restored or reused.
Widgets
Widgets are now spatial, snapping to walls and tables, blending into your environment, and remaining right where you placed them. Widgets written for iOS- and iPadOS-compatible apps using WidgetKit and SwiftUI look great on visionOS. Your widget view will automatically adopt the new visual treatments, leveraging depth and dimension — no changes required. Widgets for visionOS apps can show alternate views based on the user’s proximity, or adopt a glass or paper texture — so you can define whatever works best for your app’s content.
Games and spatial accessories
For fully immersive apps and games that require fast hand movements, visionOS now supports hand tracking up to 90 Hz with no additional code.
New, increased memory limit support enables you to bring your high-end iPad games to Vision Pro. Compositor Services delivers privacy-preserving hover effect support for Metal immersive apps. And Dynamic Render Quality enables your highly detailed scenes to shine by providing fine-grained controls to optimize your app’s render performance.
With macOS spatial rendering, use the power of your Mac to render and stream immersive content directly to Vision Pro. When building with native frameworks, the “progressive immersion” style brings more dimensionality to your existing iOS apps & games, with new “landscape” and “portrait” treatments — ideal for presenting high motion games. And, TabletopKit introduces two new APIs — CustomEquipmentState and CustomActions, to allow for even more flexibility and control.
visionOS now supports spatial accessories that allow for input in six degrees of freedom. Sony Playstation VR2 Sense controller is a spatial game controller that takes advantage of full motion tracking performance for more engaging gameplay. Logitech Muse allows creators and designers to draw or annotate in apps with great precision. visionOS includes APIs across the game controller framework and ARKit that enable developers to add support for these new accessories.
Apple Intelligence
visionOS 26 extends Apple Intelligence support to more languages including Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
With the new Foundation Models framework, your app can have direct access to the on-device, large language model that is at the core of many Apple Intelligence features. Guided generation allows you to generate structured output, and tool calling lets the model autonomously perform actions that you define in your code.
Spatial web
In visionOS 26, Safari brings more ways for people to view and interact with spatial content. Selecting Spatial Browsing from the navigation bar will transform articles on your website that support Reader mode, removing distractions and revealing inline spatial scenes that come alive as people scroll.
Easily embed 3D models into your web pages with the HTML <model> element so that visitors can view and interact with them inline or even pull the objects out so they can see them life-size in their space. The model becomes part of the page, can be styled with CSS, and configured with JavaScript.
Display spatial and immersive videos on web pages including Apple Immersive Video with HTML <video> element.
Or, offer custom immersive environments to visitors through HTML markup with a new developer preview, Web environments.
Spatial media content
RealityKit’s new ImagePresentationComponent provides an incredible new way to experience more lifelike photos by transforming 2D or spatial video content into 3D spatial scenes that people can lean into and look around.
With the new Apple Projected Media Profile (APMP), visionOS now natively supports 180º, 360º, and wide field-of-view media captured by popular third-party cameras from Canon, GoPro, and Insta360. APMP content can also be embedded and played back in your app or website.
Creators that produce Apple Immersive Video content with the new BlackMagic URSA Cine Immersive camera and DaVinci Resolve, can play it back in their apps, or from the web in Safari. And the new Immersive Media Support (IMS) framework enables you to create, process, and share Apple Immersive Video content from your own production pipelines.
When recording content on Vision Pro, you can now capture 3x more content per session with Reality Composer Pro. And the visionOS simulator now supports 4k resolution, in addition to recording for when you don’t have a device on hand.
Enterprise APIs
Enterprise APIs for visionOS grant enhanced sensor access and increased control, so you can create more powerful enterprise solutions and spatial experiences. visionOS 26 adds new APIs, so enterprise apps can:
- Extend the main camera’s access to the Shared Space.
- Access an individual main camera or both main camera feeds simultaneously.
- Receive an enhanced, stabilized video feed of a select region of interest.
- Protect sensitive content by deactivating screenshots, screen recordings, AirPlay, and SharePlay.
- Enable app windows to automatically follow the user’s position.
- Create locally shared experiences using an enterprise’s own infrastructure.
Resources
Take advantage of the latest advancements in visionOS by building your apps and games with Xcode 26 beta. Browse updated documentation and try out the sample code for the new technologies introduced at WWDC25.