Step Into Newsletter – December 8, 2024

Welcome to your short and sweet recap of the last two weeks on Step Into Vision.

Example Code

Continuing the mini series on working with Immersive Spaces, I added several new posts showing some small but useful features.

Setting Upper Limb Visibility in Immersive Spaces – We can use this scene modifier to ask the system to show or hide hands and arms while immersed in full or progressive spaces.

Open an Immersive Space with a value – Just like with Windows and Volumes, we can pass a value when opening an Immersive Space. This is useful when have multiple scenes in our RealityKitContent but want to use shared SwiftUI/RealityKit code.

Responding to changes in immersion level – When using progressive immersion, our apps can respond to changes when the user turns the Digital Crown. In this example, we create a particle emitter that uses the snow preset.

Using persistentSystemOverlays – We can hide the system hand menu in Immersive Spaces using this SwiftUI modifier.

I also added one more example to the Windows section of the series.

Taking size into account when using relative Default Window Placement – Showing three ways we can use the default window placement scene modifier to account for the initial size of a new window. The third example came in very handy in one of my apps, where the tab bars from new windows would overlap an existing window.

Labs

I build two very fun labs this week.

Lab 015 – Exploring Physics Joints – In my first step into Physics in RealityKit I made a simple toy that links a chain of spheres together with physics joints. I used a Drag Gesture to move them around and disabled gravity.

Lab 012 – Playing with Occlusion, Anchors, and Gestures – Occlusion material continues to be one of my favorite features of XR devices and I love how easy it is to use in visionOS. In this lab I combined some gestures, a hand anchor, and an entity with an occlusion material. Playing with occlusion material is a ton of fun. This lab don’t aim to teach anything, I was just building something for sake of it.

Resources

Only now new resource this time, but it is a good one! I was looking for some stylized skyboxes to use in my side project and I came across Free Stylized. This site has an impressive collection of skyboxes and textures licensed under Creative Commons. They have a paid membership program o access higher quality and customizable versions.

Next Up

I’m going to start a new series to explore hand tracking and input in ARKit. There is a lot to explore and I have a lot to learn and share along the way.