Step Into Newsletter – November 10, 2024

Exploring SwiftUI Gestures with RealityKit and hiding in a box.

The last couple of weeks have been a bit crazy, but I was able to keep making progress in a few areas.

Step Into Examples: Volumes

I added two new examples for working with volumes. These posts follow up the examples for opening, dismissing, sizing, and placing volumes.

Volume Baseplates – visionOS 2 brought us a new way to show users an indicator for the bottom of a Volume.

Volume World Alignment – Starting in visionOS 2, volumes can be tilted to face the users. This can make Volumes much more useful when sitting or lying down.

Step Into Examples: Gestures

I started a series on gestures a few weeks ago and I’ve been adding to it ever since.

Long Press Gesture – We can use Long Press Gesture to perform an action or update our scene after a delay.

Drag Gesture – A simple example of using DragGesture to move entities.

Magnify Gesture – Using the MagnifyGesture to scale entities.

Rotate Gesture 3D – Using the RotateGesture3D to rotate entities around an axis.

Bonus: Spatial Tap Gesture – Spatial Tap Gesture adds the location of the tap on the entity. We can use this to place indicators or spawn new models in our scene.

You will notice that these examples cover only the basics of reading input from the gestures. Over the next few weeks I’ll dive more into each one to improve them. I’ll add support for initial transform, smooth out movements, and start to combine gestures in useful ways.

Here is a quick demo reel of the gesture examples.

Step Into Labs

Lab 011 – Playing with Occlusion Material – I wanted to explore Occlusion Material and decided to make myself a little box. It’s been a great place to hide from the world.

From the Community

Pulsargeist is a ton of spooky fun that makes excellent use of our real world environment as a stage for a game.

BlueSky finally seems to be setting some real adoption. Follow me on BlueSky and let me know if you are active there.

Envision the future: Build great apps for visionOS is an event Apple is hosting on November 20. I can’t make it there in person but I’ll be attending remotely. Who else is spending the November 20 with Apple?