Volume Camera
PolySpatial provides a new Unity component called a Volume Camera to interact with the modes and volumes provided by the visionOS environment. Volume cameras are similar to regular Unity cameras in that they indicate which content should be visible to the user, but differ in that they capture 3D content rather than a 2D image.
Add a VolumeCamera component to an object in a scene to specify how and what content is to be presented to the user. The transform of the GameObject that holds the VolumeCamera (e.g. scale) affects the size of the volume that is displayed to the user. In-editor preview bounds for VolumeCamera can help visualize what content should be rendered.
Typically, this content is then displayed on a host platform by a corresponding "volume renderer", by mapping this canonical volume out to the host volume renderer's own distinct OBB. The effect is that 3D content within the volume camera's bounds is transformed, rotated, stretched and/or squashed to fill the volume renderer's bounds.
When Mode is set to Unbounded, everything works similar to a typical Unity camera, except that the volume camera and volume renderer each define an unbounded 3-space rather than a bounded 3-space volume.
Volume Camera Configuration Assets
The volume camera component uses specific volume camera assets to configure its setup. You can create these assets using the asset creation menu under Create->PolySpatial->Volume Camera Configuration. Make sure that you place/create these assets with a Resources folder so that they are part of the build and are available at runtime. The asset allows you to configure the bounded/unbounded state of the camera as well as the bounding scale (for bounded only). You can change the configuration of a Volume Camera instance at any time by assigning an instance of the asset to the OutputConfiguration property of the volume camera.
Volume Camera Properties
The VolumeCamera component exposes the following properties:
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| CullingMask | Defines a bitmask of Unity layers. Only objects belonging to the specified layers will be displayed by the volume camera. As for typical Unity cameras and CullingMask workflows, this can be used to specify which object(s) are visible to each individual volume camera. For example, an inventory volume camera could be used to render a 3D inventory within one volume by defining an "inventory" layer, while a "minimap" layer might be used to render a bird's eye view of the entire scene within a second volume. |
| Dimensions | This property defines the (unscaled) size of the camera's bounding box, with the box centered at the position of the VolumeCamera’s transform. The world space dimensions are calculated by element-wise multiplication of Dimensions and the transform's scale. This property represents the dimensions in Unity's world space of the Volume Camera's bounding box and is ignored if the Mode is set to Unbounded |
| Output Configuration | Defines the volume camera configuration asset that is going to be used when loading a volume camera on build. If none is set; the default volume camera under Project Settings > Polyspatial > Default Volume Camera Configuration is used instead. Do note that VolumeCameraConfiguration assets need to be placed under the Resources folder to work. |
| Mode | Specifies the mode of the volume. |
| Bounded | The volume camera has finite bounds defined by its dimensions. Any number of volume cameras can be in "bounded" mode. |
| Unbounded | The volume camera captures everything regardless of position, and the dimensions field is disabled and ignored. Only one volume camera can be in unbounded mode at a given time for a given app. Setting the mode of a volume camera to Unbounded is equivalent to requesting your app switch to "exclusive" mode. |
| Output Dimensions | Represents the volume camera dimensions that are mapped from the Dimensions property in the device. |