Unity’s Apple Vision Pro game development tool opens in beta | TechCrunch

Image credits: Brian Heater

Unity this morning announced that it has opened the beta version of its development platform for visionOS. PolySpatial, which was announced in conjunction with the Vision Pro headset at WWDC, is designed to help developers port and create a 3D experience for Apple’s spatial computing platform.

The platform is designed to remove as much friction as possible during the development process, offering familiar workflows to those who have already built applications with Unity Engine.

Unity Create president Marc Whitten notes that there are still challenges in building such an app for a piece of hardware that claims to offer a paradigm shift for computing.

[W]“We had to work, from the ground up, to make sure we could make it easy for our creators to unlock features,” he tells TechCrunch. Mostly these are things like the Unity application existing in a shared space with other applications, being able to integrate with Reality Kit and visionOS. Not only can you put Unity on the whiteboard (which is supported on day one), but you can actually put it in real space and with other experiences at the same time, be they Unity, RealityKit, or other Apple experiences.

The WWDC keynote was remarkably light on the Vision Pro gaming experiences, something of a surprise given Apple’s significant push to bring gaming to iOS and macOS in recent years. This is likely due, in part, to the company’s positioning of the product as a productivity device. In a shift away from traditional notions of extended reality, the demos largely revolved around office and creative workflows, with one side being business applications.

Of course, gaming has been a driving factor for virtually every computing platform, and the availability of unique experiences will almost certainly play a part in the fortunes of the Vision Pros.

We know there is a huge community of developers who have created stunning 3D experiences using Unity’s robust authoring tools and were so excited to build apps for Apple Vision Pro, said Mike Rockwell, vice president of Vision Products Group, in a linked release. to the news. Unity-powered apps and games run natively on Apple Vision Pro, so they have access to the revolutionary features of visionOS, including low-latency pass-through and high-resolution rendering.

PolySpatial will almost certainly be used to port existing titles to the new platform to get started. Building new experiences from scratch requires far more resources for obvious reasons.

One such example is What the Golf?, a crowdfunded game launched as part of Apples Arcade offering in 2019 (versions for macOS, Windows, Nintendo Switch and Steam have since followed). Game developer, Triband, has already started using PolySpatial to port the title.

Unity’s cross-platform support and comprehensive development tools have allowed us to leverage our existing Unity knowledge and repurpose content from our games to create a fun experience that works great on Apple Vision Pro, said Triiband CEO Peter Bruun in a statement.

Content is everything when it comes to launching a new platform. There’s a race against time before the release of Vision Pro early next year. While Unity won’t offer a time frame for the public release of PolySpatial, the limited beta release should give interested developers time to build experiences for the hardware.

Starting today, Unity will be rolling in those who signed up for the beta. The company says it’s not prioritizing AAA developers (although some will be included) and is instead choosing beta users based on the feedback it’s soliciting.

We work closely with creators throughout the process, says Whitten. Let’s start with the beta; it makes them understand where the workflow is not clear or where there is some problem with our particular support that makes it more difficult than it should be. We can fix those as we continue to scale it past the beta. We work closely with developers at every stage of their creation.