Unity PolySpatial (visionOS)

com.unity.polyspatial.visionos — Unity’s package for shipping Unity content to Apple’s visionOS. First-party documentation, so T1, with a caveat that matters more than usual here: the URL routed in is pinned to 0.1.2, generated 18 October 2023 — before the Vision Pro shipped. The current package is 2.0.4, and the two versions disagree about what PolySpatial is. Both are recorded below; what moved between them is most of what this page has to say.

The architecture: Unity simulates, RealityKit renders

The load-bearing sentence survives unchanged across both versions. PolySpatial apps are “simulated with Unity, but rendered with RealityKit, the system renderer of visionOS.”

Unity keeps the authoring environment, the scene graph, the physics, the C# — and hands the actual drawing to Apple’s renderer. That is a different arrangement from every other engine on this wiki, which own their pipeline all the way to the frame. The reason is the platform: visionOS composites multiple apps into one shared space alongside the real room, so no single app can be trusted with the frame. The trade is stated plainly by the existence of a PolySpatial XR Project Validation tool, which exists to tell developers which Unity features survive the handoff. Unity shipping a validator for its own feature set is the clearest admission of what the arrangement costs.

What changed between 0.1.2 and 2.0.4

0.1.2 (Oct 2023) names three app types: fully immersive VR, PolySpatial MR, and windowed.

2.0.4 (current) names four, and reorganises them by renderer rather than by immersion: Metal-based immersive apps, RealityKit apps (volumes or immersive spaces), hybrid apps combining Metal and RealityKit, and windowed.

The category that disappeared is “PolySpatial MR” as a thing you choose. In its place is a Metal escape hatch: on immersive apps you can now bypass RealityKit and draw with Metal directly, recovering the conventional engine arrangement at the cost of the shared-space multitasking that was the platform’s premise. Hybrid exists to have both in one app. So the shape of the two-and-a-half years is Unity negotiating back some of the rendering control the original design gave away.

Licensing — and where it lands on this wiki’s spectrum

2.0.4 restricts access to Unity Pro, Unity Enterprise, and Unity Industry users. Unity Personal does not get visionOS.

The licensing axis here has always treated Unity as the proprietary-subscription pole against Godot’s MIT and Unreal’s royalty. This sharpens that: the pole isn’t only about what you pay, it’s about which platforms your tier can reach. A hobbyist with Unity Personal cannot ship to Apple’s headset through the official path at all. Note also that 0.1.2 states no such restriction — the gate arrived with maturity, which is the same pattern as the 2023 Runtime Fee (unity-technologies) even though the mechanism is different and much less contested.

Gaps in this record

The introduction pages don’t enumerate the unsupported features, name a minimum Unity version, or state Xcode/hardware requirements; both defer to the FAQ and the validation docs. So this page can say that the feature gap exists and is managed by tooling, and cannot say what is in it — which is the single most useful thing a developer would want. The FAQ and project-validation pages are the obvious next fetch.

No separate page for visionOS or spatial computing: one source, folded here per the ENTITIES recursion discipline. A second XR-platform source makes one warranted — the spoke already holds godot-xr-game-jam-v on the community side, so the axis has two engines waiting on it.

Related

unity-engine · unity-technologies · unity-7-roadmap · godot-xr-game-jam-v · unreal-engine · synthesis