Welcome to Spatial Computing!

For the last six months, I have been working on developing an Application for the Apple Vision Pro. Strivr develops VR training solutions for enterprises and with the release of a potentially game changing device, we decided to embrace it.

I was the founding engineer for this project at our company and I want to share the knowledge I gained while developing for this device. So, over the course of my next several articles, I want to go over how to start developing for this new device.

If there are any questions please do not hesitate to reach out and ask. Maybe I'll learn a new thing from that question :)

For the first article, lets go over the tools required to develop for Apple Vision Pro.

Also, lets refer to Apple Vision Pro as AVP going forward to make it easier.

Tools required:

• Apple Silicon based Mac computer

  • Unfortunately, this is mandatory. While there are a couple of hacks you can try to get around this requirement, according to Apple, you need to have an Apple Silicon Mac - be it a Macbook or a Mac Mini etc.

• Xcode - Latest Version

  • Head over to the App Store to download the latest Xcode version. You need to select the visionOS simulator when running it and installing for the first time.

• Xcode command line tools

  • These will be installed on your first run of Xcode. But in case this was missed somehow, use the following commands to install them. This would install features like git etc.

  • xcode-select --install in your terminal app will install all the required tools.

• Reality Composer Pro

  • This also comes installed with Xcode and VisionOS SDK.

And.. that's it. All you need to start your spatial development journey is an Apple Silicon Mac and Xcode.

Note

You might come across another app called Reality Composer - This is different from what we need and is only available for the iPhone.

Extras

While you can develop your application using Xcode for free, pushing this to a headset requires an Apple developer account and signing apps to publish to Testflight or the AppStore will require you to have an Apple developer subscription.

To create your developer account head over to developer.apple.com and create your account.