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.

What does not come across (added 2026-10-06)

Unity's Supported Unity Features & Components page for package 2.0.4 (docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.polyspatial.visionos@2.0/manual/SupportedFeatures.html, first-party, T1) is the list this page was missing. Its rule: "The majority of Unity components will work without modification on this platform", but "components that need to be rendered require special support." The split falls along that line.

Simulation comes across. Transform, animation, 2D and 3D physics, scripts, AI and NavMesh are listed as supported. Audio is partial ("Not fully spatialized"); Terrain is experimental.
Custom rendering does not. Not supported: ShaderLab shaders, post-processing, Camera, Skybox, Fog, LOD, occlusion areas and portals, Lens Flare, Halo, Projector, Visual Effects, URP decals, Tilemap Renderer, Enlighten and Trees. The stated reason for post-processing: "full screen graphics post processors aren't compatible with the idea of a shared rendering system." Shaders have to be Shader Graph, because RealityKit, not Unity, draws the frame.
Partial, with conditions. MeshRenderer lighting must come through the material; skinned meshes need Optimize Game Objects off; baked lighting, light probes and reflection probes are limited to the PolySpatial Lighting Node; Video Player is limited.
Particles are three trade-offs. Replicate Properties maps to RealityKit's own particles (fast, no custom shaders, eight modules unsupported including Trails and Lights). Bake to Mesh looks closest to Unity but "currently imposes a significant performance overhead". Bake to Texture suits large systems. "VFXGraph is not currently supported."
UI works in world space only. "Screen space UI and advanced visual features like masking, shadowing, etc do not currently work", although the same page then documents image masking with caveats. The page contradicts itself here, and both statements are recorded.

Unity's own summary: "your existing Unity projects will likely require work to port to PolySpatial XR." So the answer to the spoke's open question is specific. A Unity project loses its custom shaders, its post-processing stack, VFX Graph and screen-space UI on the headset. Its gameplay code and physics survive.

Gaps in this record

~~The introduction pages don't enumerate the unsupported features,~~ Corrected 2026-10-06: the feature list is now held (section above). Still missing: a minimum Unity version and the Xcode/hardware requirements, which the introduction pages defer to the FAQ and the validation docs.

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.

Re-verified 2026-08-30. The pinned URL still serves 0.1.2, unchanged — so the caveat this page was built around is not a transient routing accident but the durable state of that documentation path. A reader following Unity's own link from an old search result still lands on October 2023.

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