visionOS PolySpatial Requirements & Limitations

Requirements

Unity Version

Unity PolySpatial and its support for visionOS require Unity 2022.3 (LTS) or later.

[!IMPORTANT[ Versions of Unity before 2022.3 aren't supported.

A developer can get started without the PolySpatial beta with an existing project by bringing it up to 2022.3 before starting to work on a visionOS port.

Hardware, OS, and Xcode

  • Compiling for visionOS currently requires Xcode 15 beta 2.
  • You must currently use an Apple Silicon (M1/M2) Mac in order to compile for visionOS.
  • Make sure visionOS Build Support (experimental) and iOS Build Support are both installed.

For more information about development setup, refer to Development & Iteration

Graphics

On visionOS, Unity delegates all rendering to the platform so that the OS can provide the best performance, battery life, and rendering quality taking into account all currently running mixed reality applications. This imposes significant constraints on the graphics features that are available.

Rendering on RealityKit will most likely have visual differences over in Unity rendering. We are constantly working to improve visual equivalency between Unity and RealityKit but note there are differences.

Render Pipeline

Your project must use either the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) or the Built-in Render Pipeline. URP is preferred; if you are considering migrating your project, this would be a good opportunity to do so. Migration documentation is available for moving to URP from the Built-in pipeline: Move on over to the Universal Render Pipeline with our advanced guide | Unity Blog

Shaders and Materials

You can author custom shaders for visionOS using a subset of the Unity ShaderGraph. Behind the scenes, this is converted to MaterialX. ShaderLab and other custom coded shaders are not supported, as RealityKit for visionOS doesn't expose a low-level shading language.

Several important standard shaders for each pipeline have been mapped to their closest available RealityKit analog. Current support includes:

  • Standard URP shaders: Lit, Simple Lit, Unlit, (+TBD - more coming)
  • Standard Builtin shaders: Standard, (+TBD – more coming)

For more information, see PolySpatial Material Support

Known Limitations

Currently Unity PolySpatial XR is shipped as an alpha product. Since this is an early release, expect documentation, workflows, and especially API changes to occur, so plan projects with this in mind.

See Supported Unity Features & Components for information about which Unity features will work without modification, and which need to be reconsidered.

For information about materials supported on this platform, see PolySpatial Material Support, and Shader Graph Support for details about implementing custom shaders via Unity Shader Graph and MaterialX.