Step Into Newsletter – April 11, 2025

More on Physics, Entity Actions, and something odd about Portals.

Happy Friday! I hope you will join us at Office Hours this afternoon. If you can’t make it today, we meet every Friday at 2:00 PM (Eastern US).

Example Code

I added two new examples to the series on Collisions & Physics. What else you could like to see in this series?

Collisions & Physics: Physics Mass Properties – We can adjust mass, inertia, and center of mass for Physics Bodies.

Collisions & Physics: Physics Material – We can adjust friction and restitution.

I also have a new post for you in the RealityKit Basics series. I documented a few use cases for changing values of components on entities.

RealityKit Basics: Modify Component Values – How do we change the values of our components?

From the Labs

Lab 045 – Entity Actions – I was looking over the RealityKit documentation and came across Entity actions. I recognized the names of the actions right away. These are the actions we can use in the Timelines feature of Reality Composer Pro. It hadn’t occurred to me to check of there was a code-version of these actions, but there is! When I tackle the Animations series, I’ll have to write a few examples using these Entity Actions.

Lab 046 – Portals can do what? – I don’t know why it occurred to me, but I started to wonder if entities with portal component could have opacity adjusted. Yes, but things get weird.

Dark Spaces

Progress has been slow the last couple of weeks, but I’ve mocked up a few ideas. Not enough to warrant a devlog post, but I shared a few concepts on Bluesky.

ideas for dark spaces, April 5, 2025#visionOS #screenshotsaturday

— Joseph Simpson (@vrhermit.com) 2025-04-05T13:06:38.861Z

Community & Resources

I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but I saw a code editor with support for macOS, iOS and visionOS. I wonder if I could use this to display example code in the Xcode projects for Labs and Example Code. I don’t really need an editor, but this could speed up formatting.

John Haney released the 2.0 version for HandGesture.

HandGesture 2.0 for visionOS is now available.This update simplifies the protocol for HandGesture and resolves an issue where gestures could remain if the user navigated away from the SwiftUI view where you had applied them.github.com/johnhaney/Ha…

— John Haney ᯅ (@johnhaney.bsky.social) 2025-04-11T03:31:48.744Z

Reminder: Step Into Vision has a growing section of Resources. There are links to developers, websites, blogs, YouTube channels, newsletters, tools, and assets. I try to add something new to this every week so make sure to check it often.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!