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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How to Achieve Volumetric Lighting (Light Shafts) in RealityKit on visionOS?
Hello everyone, I am currently developing an experience for visionOS using RealityKit and I would like to achieve volumetric light effects, such as visible light rays or shafts through fog or dust. I found this GitHub project: https://github.com/robcupisz/LightShafts, which demonstrates the kind of visual style I am aiming for. I would like to know if there is a way to create similar effects using RealityKit on visionOS. So far, I have experimented with DirectionalLight, SpotLight, ImageBasedLight, and custom materials (e.g., additive blending on translucent meshes), but none of these approaches can replicate the volumetric light shaft look shown in the repository above. Questions: Is there a recommended technique or workaround in RealityKit to simulate light shafts or volumetric lighting? Is creating a custom mesh (e.g., cone or volume geometry with gradient alpha and additive blending) the only feasible method? Are there any examples, best practices, or sample projects from Apple or other developers that showcase a similar visual style? Any advice or hints would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!
9
1
994
Aug ’25
Unwanted file changes in Reality Composer Pro project when using Git
Hello, I'm working on a visionOS project that uses Reality Composer Pro, and we are managing our project files with Git. We've noticed that simply opening and closing the Reality Composer Pro application consistently generates changes in the following files, even when no explicit modifications have been made by the developer: {ProjectName}/Packages/RealityKitContent/Package.realitycomposerpro/PluginData/*******/ShaderGraphEditorPluginID/ShaderGraphEditorPluginID {ProjectName}/Packages/RealityKitContent/Package.realitycomposerpro/WorkspaceData/SceneMetadataList.json Could you please clarify the purpose of these files? Why do they appear as modified when no direct changes are made from our end? More importantly, is it safe to add these files to our .gitignore to prevent them from being tracked by Git? We are concerned that ignoring these files might lead to unexpected issues or inconsistencies when other team members pull the latest changes, especially if these files contain critical project metadata or state that needs to be synchronized. Any insights or recommended best practices for managing Reality Composer Pro projects with Git would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and assistance.
1
0
334
Jun ’25
RCP Scene issues at runtime (visionOS 26 / Xcode 26 Beta 4)
I have a scene that has been assembled in RCP but I'm losing the correct hierarchy and transforms when running the scene in the headset or the simulator. This is in RCP: This is at runtime with the debugger: As you can see the "MAIN_WAGON" entity is gone and part of the hierarchy are now children of "TRAIN_ROOT" instead. Another issue is that not only part of the hieararchy disappears, it also reverts back to default values of the transform instead of what is set in RCP: This is in RCP: This is in the simulator/headset: I'm filing a feedback ticket too and will post the number here. Anyone had a similar issue and found a fix or workaround ?
5
0
434
Aug ’25
High CPU with ARWorldTrackingConfiguration vs. ARBodyTrackingConfiguration using AREnvironmentTexturing
In a simple test, I'm observing ~30% higher CPU usage with the ARWorldTrackingConfiguration compared to the ARBodyTrackingConfiguration when both configurations have AREnvironmentTexturing enabled. In Instruments, I observe Recon3D consuming ~5.5 seconds of CPU time with the ARWorldTrackingConfiguration vs <0.3 second with the ARBodyTrackingConfiguration in two separate 30 seconds samples. This is on an iPhone 12 Pro equipped with lidar. Is there a reason why two separate configurations, both having the same features enabled would have a different CPU overhead?
0
0
189
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.
2
0
312
Aug ’25
How to get the transform of the joint in a skeleton when it is Animating
I have an entity that was created using Mixamo, and it has an animation. after the animation completes the mesh of the robot is not where the entity is positioned. I want to do something like when the animation finishes, I set the root entity's transform to the mesh's transform. There are no transformations applied to any of the children of this root of the model, which means that the transformations are applied to the skeleton due the the playing of animations. Is there a way where I can apply the final position of the root of the skeleton to the root entity to make sure to position the entity where the animation has ended just before the next animation plays?
0
0
159
May ’25
Please provide access to face tracking blendshapes on vision os
Apple, please provide access to face tracking blend shapes on vision os, just like you do on iOS. You have the best eye and face tracking implementation on the market, please let us use it. There is a sizable audience who will buy the headset just for it. I personally know multiple people who are not buying the headset simply because you locked those features out. No raw camera access is needed, just abstracted blendshapes values. You will make the headset so much more useful if you do this simple thing.
1
1
155
Jun ’25
Entity jittering when using hand anchor
Hello! I'm a developer of Ping Pong for Apple Vision Pro (Ping Pong Club). I'm experiencing an issues with collisions between ball and paddle. Sometimes the ball just unexpectedly flying away like it has been hit to hard. I believe this is happening because hand anchors are jittering (ping pong paddle has hand anchor component) and at the time of collision unnecessary micro motion produced. I've build a demo app to demonstrate that: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gBh-DsXuVZdvDrrD7gJcbJ_hg7tvVKUV/view?usp=share_link Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1poPbsJdBz87edqrWIfBt1eSVzfm5CTek/view?usp=sharing Is there a way to add some threshold to prevent jittering?
0
0
118
Jun ’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?).
3
0
274
Aug ’25
ARKit camera transform orientation vector doesn't match physical device heading (despite `.gravityAndHeading`)
Hi all, I'm working on an ARKit-based iOS app where I need to accurately determine the direction the device is facing to localize objects in the real world. I'm using: let config = ARWorldTrackingConfiguration() config.worldAlignment = .gravityAndHeading Thus, I would expect the world alignment to behave as given in the gravityAndHeading page. The AR session is started after verifying that CLLocationManager.headingAccuracy <= 20, and the compass appears to be calibrated. However, I'm seeing a major inconsistency: When the rear camera is physically pointed toward true North, I would expect: cameraTransform.columns.2.z ≈ -1 // (i.e. ARKit's -Z pointing North) But instead, I'm consistently seeing: cameraTransform.columns.2.z ≈ +0.97 // Implies camera is facing South Meanwhile, the translation vector behaves as expected: As I physically move North, cameraTransform.columns.3.z becomes more negative, matching the world’s +Z = South assumption. For example, let's say I have the device in landscapeRight (or landscapeLeft for UIDeviceOrientation). Let's say the device rear camera is pointing towards True North, and I start moving towards True North. I get something like this: Camera Transform = simd_float4x4( [ [0.98446155, -0.030119859, 0.172998, 0.0], [0.023979114, 0.9990097, 0.037477385, 0.0], [-0.17395553, -0.032746706, 0.98420894, 0.0], [0.024039675, -0.037087332, -0.22780673, 0.99999994] ]) As you can see, the cameraTransform.columns.2.z is positive despite the rear camera pointing towards True North, while cameraTransform.columns.3.z is correctly positive as the device is moving towards True North. So here is my question: Why is cameraTransform.columns.2.z positive when the rear camera is physically facing North? Any clarity would be deeply appreciated. I've read the documentation and tested with different heading accuracies and AR session resets, but I keep running into this orientation mismatch. Thanks in advance!
1
0
152
Jun ’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?
1
0
763
Aug ’25
I need to loop my videoMaterial.
I need to loop my videoMaterial and I don't know how to make it happen in my code. I have included an image of my videoMaterial code. Any help making this happen with be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Christopher
1
0
138
Jun ’25
How to Achieve Volumetric Lighting (Light Shafts) in RealityKit on visionOS?
Hello everyone, I am currently developing an experience for visionOS using RealityKit and I would like to achieve volumetric light effects, such as visible light rays or shafts through fog or dust. I found this GitHub project: https://github.com/robcupisz/LightShafts, which demonstrates the kind of visual style I am aiming for. I would like to know if there is a way to create similar effects using RealityKit on visionOS. So far, I have experimented with DirectionalLight, SpotLight, ImageBasedLight, and custom materials (e.g., additive blending on translucent meshes), but none of these approaches can replicate the volumetric light shaft look shown in the repository above. Questions: Is there a recommended technique or workaround in RealityKit to simulate light shafts or volumetric lighting? Is creating a custom mesh (e.g., cone or volume geometry with gradient alpha and additive blending) the only feasible method? Are there any examples, best practices, or sample projects from Apple or other developers that showcase a similar visual style? Any advice or hints would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!
Replies
9
Boosts
1
Views
994
Activity
Aug ’25
Unwanted file changes in Reality Composer Pro project when using Git
Hello, I'm working on a visionOS project that uses Reality Composer Pro, and we are managing our project files with Git. We've noticed that simply opening and closing the Reality Composer Pro application consistently generates changes in the following files, even when no explicit modifications have been made by the developer: {ProjectName}/Packages/RealityKitContent/Package.realitycomposerpro/PluginData/*******/ShaderGraphEditorPluginID/ShaderGraphEditorPluginID {ProjectName}/Packages/RealityKitContent/Package.realitycomposerpro/WorkspaceData/SceneMetadataList.json Could you please clarify the purpose of these files? Why do they appear as modified when no direct changes are made from our end? More importantly, is it safe to add these files to our .gitignore to prevent them from being tracked by Git? We are concerned that ignoring these files might lead to unexpected issues or inconsistencies when other team members pull the latest changes, especially if these files contain critical project metadata or state that needs to be synchronized. Any insights or recommended best practices for managing Reality Composer Pro projects with Git would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and assistance.
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
334
Activity
Jun ’25
RCP Scene issues at runtime (visionOS 26 / Xcode 26 Beta 4)
I have a scene that has been assembled in RCP but I'm losing the correct hierarchy and transforms when running the scene in the headset or the simulator. This is in RCP: This is at runtime with the debugger: As you can see the "MAIN_WAGON" entity is gone and part of the hierarchy are now children of "TRAIN_ROOT" instead. Another issue is that not only part of the hieararchy disappears, it also reverts back to default values of the transform instead of what is set in RCP: This is in RCP: This is in the simulator/headset: I'm filing a feedback ticket too and will post the number here. Anyone had a similar issue and found a fix or workaround ?
Replies
5
Boosts
0
Views
434
Activity
Aug ’25
Is it possible to use a scale hover effect on an entity?
I see no way to scale an entity with a hover effect. The closest I can find is by using HoverEffectComponent with a shader hover effect. Maybe I can change the scale with a ShaderGraph, but I cannot figure out how.
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
173
Activity
Jun ’25
High CPU with ARWorldTrackingConfiguration vs. ARBodyTrackingConfiguration using AREnvironmentTexturing
In a simple test, I'm observing ~30% higher CPU usage with the ARWorldTrackingConfiguration compared to the ARBodyTrackingConfiguration when both configurations have AREnvironmentTexturing enabled. In Instruments, I observe Recon3D consuming ~5.5 seconds of CPU time with the ARWorldTrackingConfiguration vs <0.3 second with the ARBodyTrackingConfiguration in two separate 30 seconds samples. This is on an iPhone 12 Pro equipped with lidar. Is there a reason why two separate configurations, both having the same features enabled would have a different CPU overhead?
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
189
Activity
Aug ’25
Mirroring MacBook screen onto app
Hello all, I saw this interesting VisionOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/splitscreen-multi-display/id6478007837 I was wondering if there was any documentation on the Swift APIs that were used to create this app.
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
228
Activity
Jun ’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.
Replies
2
Boosts
0
Views
312
Activity
Aug ’25
How to get the transform of the joint in a skeleton when it is Animating
I have an entity that was created using Mixamo, and it has an animation. after the animation completes the mesh of the robot is not where the entity is positioned. I want to do something like when the animation finishes, I set the root entity's transform to the mesh's transform. There are no transformations applied to any of the children of this root of the model, which means that the transformations are applied to the skeleton due the the playing of animations. Is there a way where I can apply the final position of the root of the skeleton to the root entity to make sure to position the entity where the animation has ended just before the next animation plays?
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
159
Activity
May ’25
Can't build old project on Xcode 26 beta5
I have a visionOS 2 project created on Xcode 16, when I updated to Xcode 26 beta5, I can't build it any more, every time it stuck in process like the picture shows below: Already tried many methods to fix this issue, such as clear build folders, but don't work. MacBook Air M2 / MacOS 26 beta5 / Xcode 26 beta5
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
232
Activity
Aug ’25
Please provide access to face tracking blendshapes on vision os
Apple, please provide access to face tracking blend shapes on vision os, just like you do on iOS. You have the best eye and face tracking implementation on the market, please let us use it. There is a sizable audience who will buy the headset just for it. I personally know multiple people who are not buying the headset simply because you locked those features out. No raw camera access is needed, just abstracted blendshapes values. You will make the headset so much more useful if you do this simple thing.
Replies
1
Boosts
1
Views
155
Activity
Jun ’25
Can't observe Entity's orientation properties in Slider
On Xcode 26 and visionOS 26, apple provides observable property for Entity, so we can easily interact with Entity between RealityScene and SwiftUI, but there is a issue: It's fine to observe Entity's position and scale properties in Slider, but can't observe orientation properties in Slider. MacBook Air M2 / Xcode 26 beta6
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
226
Activity
Aug ’25
Entity jittering when using hand anchor
Hello! I'm a developer of Ping Pong for Apple Vision Pro (Ping Pong Club). I'm experiencing an issues with collisions between ball and paddle. Sometimes the ball just unexpectedly flying away like it has been hit to hard. I believe this is happening because hand anchors are jittering (ping pong paddle has hand anchor component) and at the time of collision unnecessary micro motion produced. I've build a demo app to demonstrate that: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gBh-DsXuVZdvDrrD7gJcbJ_hg7tvVKUV/view?usp=share_link Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1poPbsJdBz87edqrWIfBt1eSVzfm5CTek/view?usp=sharing Is there a way to add some threshold to prevent jittering?
Replies
0
Boosts
0
Views
118
Activity
Jun ’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?).
Replies
3
Boosts
0
Views
274
Activity
Aug ’25
ARKit camera transform orientation vector doesn't match physical device heading (despite `.gravityAndHeading`)
Hi all, I'm working on an ARKit-based iOS app where I need to accurately determine the direction the device is facing to localize objects in the real world. I'm using: let config = ARWorldTrackingConfiguration() config.worldAlignment = .gravityAndHeading Thus, I would expect the world alignment to behave as given in the gravityAndHeading page. The AR session is started after verifying that CLLocationManager.headingAccuracy <= 20, and the compass appears to be calibrated. However, I'm seeing a major inconsistency: When the rear camera is physically pointed toward true North, I would expect: cameraTransform.columns.2.z ≈ -1 // (i.e. ARKit's -Z pointing North) But instead, I'm consistently seeing: cameraTransform.columns.2.z ≈ +0.97 // Implies camera is facing South Meanwhile, the translation vector behaves as expected: As I physically move North, cameraTransform.columns.3.z becomes more negative, matching the world’s +Z = South assumption. For example, let's say I have the device in landscapeRight (or landscapeLeft for UIDeviceOrientation). Let's say the device rear camera is pointing towards True North, and I start moving towards True North. I get something like this: Camera Transform = simd_float4x4( [ [0.98446155, -0.030119859, 0.172998, 0.0], [0.023979114, 0.9990097, 0.037477385, 0.0], [-0.17395553, -0.032746706, 0.98420894, 0.0], [0.024039675, -0.037087332, -0.22780673, 0.99999994] ]) As you can see, the cameraTransform.columns.2.z is positive despite the rear camera pointing towards True North, while cameraTransform.columns.3.z is correctly positive as the device is moving towards True North. So here is my question: Why is cameraTransform.columns.2.z positive when the rear camera is physically facing North? Any clarity would be deeply appreciated. I've read the documentation and tested with different heading accuracies and AR session resets, but I keep running into this orientation mismatch. Thanks in advance!
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
152
Activity
Jun ’25
How to give spatial photo a custom corner radius?
Spatial photo in RealityView has a default corner radius. I made a parallel effect with spatial photos in ScrollView(like Spatial Gallery), but the corner radius disappeared on left and right spatial photos. I've tried .clipShape and .mask modifiers, but they did't work. How to clip or mask spatial photo with corner radius effect?
Replies
0
Boosts
1
Views
486
Activity
Aug ’25
How can I achieve this effect using SwiftUI or ShaderGraph?
How do you call the effect where the edges around the central image gradually become transparent? This effect is also seen when viewing immersive mode of spatial photos in Vision Pro. How can I achieve this effect using SwiftUI or ShaderGraph? I want to use this effect when displaying images in my app.
Replies
4
Boosts
0
Views
713
Activity
May ’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?
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
763
Activity
Aug ’25
RemoteImmersiveSpace sample isn't working
Hello RemoteDeviceIdentifier returns nil and therefore it crashes the HoverEffect sample project. I have vision26 beta 2 on both devices what the correct method of running this code sample ?
Replies
3
Boosts
0
Views
183
Activity
Jun ’25
What is the environment in the Vision Pro simulator sidebar?
If I long press on an element, the sidebar disappears and then a Done appears on the screen, but nothing else changes, so what are the Environments in Vision Pro's Simulator?
Replies
2
Boosts
0
Views
115
Activity
Aug ’25
I need to loop my videoMaterial.
I need to loop my videoMaterial and I don't know how to make it happen in my code. I have included an image of my videoMaterial code. Any help making this happen with be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Christopher
Replies
1
Boosts
0
Views
138
Activity
Jun ’25