Shared Space and Spatial Apps

Shared Space

The spatial-computing architecture introduced by visionOS provides a brand-new app runtime environment called Shared Space.

A Shared Space is a Mixed Reality 3D environment that matches the physical space around you.

Within this single 3D space, multiple apps can coexist harmoniously - they fit naturally into the real-world environment and with one another.

These Multitasking Apps include not only traditional 2D apps but also Spatial Apps that take advantage of 3D space and contain 3D content.

Spatial Apps

Inside a Shared Space, an app's content is no longer confined to the plane of a 2D window; it can extend into the 3D space in front of that plane. In addition to X and Y, content's positioning and layout now incorporate a true Z-axis.

Content is no longer limited to 2D window containers. It can be placed in spatial containers that have volume, similar to 3D bounding boxes.

An app can be made up of multiple such content containers, all of which are managed uniformly by the spatial-computing OS.

Many 2D UI elements that make up the content can be spatialized, meaning they enter 3D space where they can be positioned, laid out, and transformed.

You can also use 3D UI elements to build richer, more flexible and fully-featured 3D content. These 3D elements can be laid out together with 2D UI elements along the X, Y, and Z axes, creating more sophisticated mixed 2D-and-3D UI components.

This kind of app is called a Spatial App.

Spatial Apps are the new generation of XR apps. They preserve the strengths of 2D apps from desktop and mobile platforms while gaining optional, progressive spatial enhancements on spatial-computing platforms.

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Example apps shown above:

Unified Rendering

Unlike traditional XR apps, spatial apps don't have to rendering their own content or build full XR interactions. Instead, the OS that provides the Shared Space offers a unified rendering service and handles fundamental natural interactions (for example, gaze and hand interaction).

Multiple Spatial Apps can blend into a single coordinate system and lighting environment inside the Shared Space, complete with positional relationships, occlusion, shadows, and more.

Because of this, Spatial Apps cannot freely build independent rendering pipelines. Instead, they expose content through OS-managed 2D/3D containers called Scenes and describe that content via APIs the OS understands. This lets the OS understand and manage apps' content, enabling Unified Rendering.

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Unified Rendering App Model: