Hybrid sample project?

Hi
Does a hybrid sample project exist somewhere? I’m curious about what we can do in hybrid mode that isn’t possible when going through RealityKit/Polyspatial. Are any examples available to demonstrate this?

Hey there! Thanks for reaching out and sorry to hear you’re having trouble.

Unfortunately, no. We do not provide a sample for Hybrid mode. Hybrid mode combines the capabilities of Metal Rendering and RealityKit. I assume you’ve read the documentation but the short answer is that it allows you to enable or disable Metal/Unity rendering alongside RealityKit. So for example you can use RealityKit volumes alongside a fully immersive scene using Unity URP with its full feature set, ShaderLab custom shaders, etc. Or you can switch “modes” between a RealityKit immersive space and a Metal one. Simply change the output configuration of your VolumeCamera to make the switch.

If you’d like to see a fully fledged example of Hybrid mode, please add it as an “idea” to our visionOS roadmap. That way we can see how many other users are requesting it, and weigh it against other requested features.

Thanks again for reaching out and good luck!

Thanks, I’ve submitted the idea of having a hybrid sample project.

We really need this as we’re currently struggling to convince management why we should keep using Unity to develop Vision Pro apps instead of just using the native tools Apple provides.
If we could show something that’s not possible using RealityKit we would have a much stronger case.

I see what you mean. It’s not much, but there’s about 10 seconds in our PolySpatial 2.0 sizzle reel that shows the Terminal scene from the URP template, first rendered with RealityKit, and then transitioning into Metal rendering mode. It shows off the pros and cons of the two renderers pretty well. It’s not something we were able to ship (we had to make a lot of fixes/tweaks to get the template to run well on the device and work with RealityKit) but we’ll eventually get to a place where you can just drop PolySpatial into one of these template projects and test them out in different modes. Of course, a dedicated Hybrid sample would also go a long way. We’ll get there.

In the meantime, I would suggest that you just use Quest/VR apps as your reference point for what can be done with Hybrid/Metal mode. You should be able to achieve roughly the same look as any Quest title using Hybrid/Metal rendering (both are just Unity rendering a frame at the end of the day). Some high level features to highlight might be:

  • Post processing effects like bloom and color correction
  • Advanced particle systems (including VFX graph)
  • Toon shading, SSAO, Global Illumination… basically anything involving custom shaders or alternative lighting models

The list goes on :slight_smile:

I could swear I wrote a long discussions post where I described some of the pros/cons of RealityKit vs. Unity/Metal rendering, but I can’t seem to find it. I think the best source of info right now is that documentation page I linked above. If I find a better breakdown I’ll let you know!

Edit: of course 30 seconds later I found the reply :laughing:

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