Unity has officially launched 1.0 support for visionOS, making its now Vision Pro-compatible game engine available to all Unity Pro, Enterprise, and Industry subscribers.

Unity announced in recent a blog post that support for visionOS is now out of beta, which lets paid users create three main types of XR experiences: mixed reality apps, fully-immersive virtual reality apps, and 2D windowed content that is resizable and repositionable by the user.

Beta users included Light Brick Studio, which ported LEGO Builder’s Journey to Vision Pro, and TRIPP, the studio behind the titular meditation app. Both TRIPP and Lego Builder’s Journey are available on the Quest platform.

Some of the key features of its Unity’s 1.0 visionOS support include ‘Play to Device’, which allows live-previewing of content on the visionOS simulator, or Apple Vision Pro within the Unity Editor. For VR experiences, developers can access device-specific features like foveated rendering and MSAA, enhancing visual quality and performance.

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Notably, development for visionOS is limited to Mac computers with Apple silicon. To start building spatial apps for Apple Vision Pro with Unity, developers need to download the latest Unity version, ensure visionOS build target installation, and follow the setup process provided in the visionOS template. Check out the full guide here.

Unity suffered some pretty serious backlash when it announced back in September it was ready to levy significant fees on developers. The company has since reversed its stance on pricing, and also saw CEO John Riccitiello step down as a result.

Last we heard, Unity’s main competitor Unreal Engine from Epic Games was exploring native Unreal Engine support for Vision Pro, however Epic hasn’t made any announcements on when/if that will come.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • xyzs

    Does visionOS support OpenXR ?

    If the answer is no, and they made their own apple bs, that’s gonna piss me off.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      No, you can’t use OpenXR on visionOS. The XR Hands package was originally designed for OpenXR, but we have added support for visionOS, too. (We still need to update the XR Hands package docs with this information.)

      Unity’s answer from yesterday about their hand tracking on AVP, not about OpenXR support on visionOS. But if visionOS already supported OpenXR, they’d use that instead of adding special support for visionOS. Making it likely that, at least for now, visionOS doesn’t support OpenXR.

      Apple announced support for WebXR in Safari, which is usually implemented on top of OpenXR, and their track record regarding open standards is better than what many believe. So I’d expect them to (in the future) support OpenXR for Immersive Mode, to enable ports of existing VR/AR apps. But their current focus is on extending existing iPhone/iPad apps with XR elements, and these use Apple’s SDK, not OpenXR.

      I’m less sure about support than in the past, as Apple apparently positions AVP as mostly an iPad/MacBook in headset form, not an AR HMD, and most certainly not a VR HMD. So using XR enhanced iOS apps isn’t just a compensation for still lacking XR apps, but the intended use. It’s actually “spatial computing” that just uses similar hardware to XR HMDs, not necessarily the same apps.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      It’s Apple, ofcourse they don’t support real OpenXR.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        There’s nothing “of course” about this, they support loads of open standards. The naysayers are usually hung up about Apple using Metal instead of Vulkan, forgetting that it released for iOS in 2014. Before Vulkan was even started, with support introduced 2016 in Android 7. Or that Microsoft keeps pushing their own DX12 instead of Vulkan.

        I hope Apple will support OpenXR, but the practical impact will be limited. OpenXR was very useful to unify similar APIs from different VR vendors, also making it easier to integrate new peripherals. But most VR apps don’t use OpenXR or platform specific SDKs directly, instead they use a game engine. In most cases Unity, which offers another, more “Unity-like” XR abstraction layer that can speak to OpenXR, but also to visionOS. So many Unity VR games/apps can be build for visionOS too, even if Apple doesn’t supporting OpenXR.

        And while OpenXR is great for VR/AR apps, it wasn’t designed for the integration of 2D and XR apps. So either Khronos Group will have to extend OpenXR, or Google will come up with more non-OpenXR interfaces for Android based XR HMDs from Samsung and others, similar to Apple.

  • g-man

    FYI the title of this article in the RSS feed has Google tracking code in it.

    Google invades privacy, maybe you should stop using them.

  • Harald Heide Gundersen

    Costs to attend the VisionPro developer party gets way to high comparng to potensial income for 90% of indies, greatly reducing potensial app portfolio on the plattform. Too bad. (Demands investing in one or two Vision Pro’s, a decent Mac, yearly software fees ++ )

  • Harald Heide Gundersen

    BTW Gets some bs… error when trying to use XR Management 4.4.1 about developing for vision OS in Unity 2023 personal edition.
    Had to downgrade to 4.4.0. <<<<<<<<Quite annoying