Step Into Newsletter – February 16, 2025

Step Into Office Hours, Project Devlogs, and a recap of the past two weeks.

Attending MIT Reality Hack a few weeks ago was great, but I’m very glad to be back in my routine. Let’s dive into a recap of the last two weeks on Step Into Vision.

Example Code

I’ve continued to make progress on the Spatial SwiftUI series. These examples show how to use toolbars and tab controls in windows and volumes. I highlight a few design considerations when using these.

Spatial SwiftUI: Window Toolbars

Spatial SwiftUI: Window TabViews

Spatial SwiftUI: Volume Toolbars

Spatial SwiftUI: Volume TabViews

I added a new post in the RealityKit Basics series. This shows a few examples of how we can interact with our 3D content.

RealityKit Basics: Interaction

From the Labs

Lab 032 – The Probe – I had a bit of fun mocking up certain space probe. Have you seen any whales?

Lab 033 – Teleportation with SpatialTapGesture – We can’t move the player/user entity in RealityKit, but we can move the world around them instead. This is the first or many teleportation labs.

New: Devlogs

I’m working on a new section of the site called Devlogs. I’ll share my progress on the projects and products I’m building for the App Store. At some point I intend to back-fill a few posts related to my app Project Graveyard. For now, I’ve been sharing a few details about a new product code-named Dark Spaces.

Dark Spaces – Devlog 001 – A collection of immersive spaces that I’m slowly turning into my next app.

Dark Spaces – Devlog 002 – Between sky and earth, the horizon is gone.

Dark Spaces – Devlog 003 – What if the primary way to select from the list of dark spaces in a dark hallway?

Articles and Resources

On Tap Behavior and the need for better documentation. This article makes a case for better documentation, especially for Reality Composer Pro. I detail my frustration learning how to use what should be a pretty simple feature. Unfortunately, the answer was scatted in several places, none of which were the Help or Documentation for the tool. Please read this and share it with folks at Apple if you can. I particularly want to get it in front of Developer Relations.

Introducing Step Into Vision Office Hours. This has been in the works for a while now. We even hosted a few test meetings. I’m happy to tell you that from now on, I’ll be hosting a weekly office hours session. This is an informal meeting where visionOS developers can hang out. We can talk about projects, get help with technical issues, or just geek out about Spatial Computing. Join us every Friday at 2:00 PM EST. or details and rules, see the new landing page. About Office Hours.

Resource: Hacking with Swift – One of the best sites on the internet for learning Swift and SwiftUI.

Resource: visionOS Examples by Matt Pfeiffer – Matt is creating and sharing visionOS examples in the form of Gists. Follow him on Bluesky and encourage him to share is work there.

Weekend Read: What I Want From visionOS 3, visionOS 4, and visionOS 5. In this article Tony lays out a vision for several powerful ways to improve visionOS over the next few versions.

Weekend Read: Pioneering Spatial Computing Education: From iOS to visionOS. Francesco Perchiazzi reflects on the past year of visionOS development and explore some of the challenges ahead when teaching Spatial Computing development.

That’s all from me for now. I hope to see you at Office Hours some time.

Joseph