Reality Composer

Reality Composer
Information
Type	Authoring tool
Industry	Augmented reality
Developer	Apple Inc.
Operating System	iOS, iPadOS, macOS (Mac version bundled with Xcode 11 to Xcode 14)
License	Proprietary, free download
Supported Devices	iPhone, iPad, Mac
Release Date	June 3, 2019 (announced); September 19, 2019 (iOS app)
Website	https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reality-composer/id1462358802

Reality Composer is an augmented reality (AR) authoring app made by Apple Inc. for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Apple announced it on June 3, 2019, together with ARKit 3 and the RealityKit framework, and described it as an app that lets developers "easily prototype and produce AR experiences with no prior 3D experience." Users place objects from a built-in content library or their own USDZ files, attach simple animations, sounds and interactions through a trigger-and-action "behaviors" system, and test the scene in AR on the device. Finished scenes can be loaded into an app through Xcode and RealityKit, or exported for Apple's AR Quick Look viewer.

The iPhone and iPad app went on sale in the App Store as a free download on September 19, 2019, and its most recent update, version 1.6 of October 10, 2023, added Object Capture photogrammetry for devices with a LiDAR scanner. The Mac version was bundled with Xcode until Apple dropped it in Xcode 15. For Apple Vision Pro and visionOS, Apple introduced a separate Mac tool, Reality Composer Pro, in June 2023; its third major version was released in 2026 as a standalone Mac download, offered as a beta.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Dates, version history, features and current status checked against Apple newsroom posts, WWDC19/23/24/26 sessions, Xcode 15/16 release notes, App Store listings and Reality Composer Pro 3 documentation, plus the cited press reports and two HCI papers. About review dates.

History

Announcement and release

Apple introduced Reality Composer at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 3, 2019. The same announcement covered ARKit 3, which added people occlusion and motion capture, and RealityKit, a new rendering and simulation framework built for AR. Apple said scenes assembled in Reality Composer "can be directly integrated into an app in Xcode or exported to AR Quick Look." 9to5Mac reported on the day that Reality Composer would be part of the new developer tools released to developers right after the keynote. UploadVR noted that developers could use it either to build scenes that ship inside iOS apps through RealityKit or purely as a prototyping tool.

In the WWDC 2019 session that introduced both products, Apple described the app as "a Mac and iOS tool that enables simple AR-based content creation." The macOS version came with Xcode 11, and the iPhone and iPad version was distributed through the App Store. Version 1.0 of the iOS app appeared on September 19, 2019. 9to5Mac's report that day said it was a free download that required iOS 13.

Updates

Apple updated the iOS and iPadOS app several times between 2019 and 2023. Most releases were maintenance updates. Version 1.4 (March 2020) added accessibility annotations for AR Quick Look experiences and direct export of scenes as .usdz files. On the 2020 iPad Pro models it also added object occlusion, where real objects hide virtual ones, and instant placement. Version 1.5 (September 2020) improved occlusion on devices with the LiDAR Scanner.

Version	Date	Notable changes (per Apple's App Store release notes)
1.0	September 19, 2019	Initial release
1.1	September 28, 2019	Support for iPadOS; bug fixes
1.2	November 7, 2019	Bug fixes
1.3.1	December 12, 2019	Bug fixes
1.4	March 26, 2020	Accessibility annotations for AR Quick Look; export of scenes as .usdz files; object occlusion and instant placement on iPad Pro 11-inch (2nd generation) and iPad Pro 12.9-inch (4th generation)
1.4.1	July 15, 2020	Bug fixes
1.5	September 21, 2020	Improved occlusion on devices with the LiDAR Scanner
1.5.1	November 10, 2020	Bug fixes and performance improvements
1.5.2	November 2, 2021	Bug fixes and performance improvements
1.5.3	June 3, 2022	Bug fixes
1.6	October 10, 2023	Object Capture: guided photogrammetry capture of 3D models on iPhone 12 Pro or later and iPad Pro (5th generation) or later

Version 1.6 brought Object Capture to Reality Composer. It is a guided photogrammetry process that uses the LiDAR sensors of recent iPhones and iPads to produce USDZ models. Apple's release notes say such models can be viewed in AR Quick Look or brought into Reality Composer Pro.

Removal from Xcode

The Mac version shipped inside Xcode from Xcode 11 through Xcode 14. Apple's Xcode 15 release notes state: "Starting in Xcode 15, Reality Composer for macOS is no longer included, but remains available for iOS and iPadOS on the App Store. Reality Composer Pro will be available in a future release." As of October 2026 the iPhone and iPad app is still listed on the App Store at version 1.6 and requires iOS 17.0 or iPadOS 17.0 or later.

Features

Scenes and anchors

A Reality Composer project contains one or more scenes. Apple's 2019 session describes a scene as a collection of entities made up of an anchor, objects, behaviors and a physics world, and each scene has exactly one anchor. When a scene is created, the user chooses a horizontal anchor (for a room, stage or tabletop), a vertical anchor (a wall), an image anchor (a book, packaging or poster) or a face anchor (selfie effects such as glasses or hats).

Content can be laid out on a canvas or directly in AR on an iPhone or iPad. The built-in library ranges from simple shapes to common objects and buildings. It includes parametric items and a picture frame that displays the user's own photos, and users can import their own USDZ models. Projects can be moved between a Mac and an iOS device. The "edit on iOS" option let a developer start a project on the Mac and keep working on the same project on an iPad or iPhone, or the reverse. The app can also record sensor and camera data at the intended location and replay it later while the app is being built in Xcode.

Behaviors

Interactivity comes from behaviors. Each behavior pairs a trigger with an action sequence, and behaviors can only target objects in the same scene. The 2019 version offered five triggers:

Trigger	When the action sequence starts
Scene start	As soon as the scene is loaded
Tap	When the user taps a chosen object
Proximity	When the camera comes within a set distance of an object
Collision	When two chosen objects collide
Notification	When the host app fires the trigger from code

Actions in a sequence play one after another by default. They can be grouped to run in parallel, looped, or marked "exclusive," which stops any other exclusive sequence that is running. The action set covered show and hide animations, emphasis animations (such as a pop), spin and orbit actions, Move By and Move To transforms, a Look At action that turns an object toward the camera, playback of animations stored in USD assets, and three sound actions: Play Sound (spatial, from the object), Play Ambient and Play Music. A Notify action lets a scene call custom code in the app.

Physics

Reality Composer includes a physics simulation. In the 2019 version, scenes have Earth gravity by default, and the value can be changed. Objects can be given one of six physics materials (ice makes an object slide, rubber makes it bouncy), a force action can give an object an initial impulse, and collision shapes can be a box, sphere or capsule. By default an object does not take part in the simulation until it is set to collide or simulate.

Xcode integration and Reality files

Xcode's RealityKit AR and Game templates included a Reality Composer project file (.rcproject). The file could be previewed in Xcode and opened in Reality Composer from there. When the app was built, Xcode exported the project as a Reality file (.reality). Apple described the Reality file as containing all the data needed for rendering and simulation, optimized for RealityKit; each scene in it is an anchor entity. Xcode also generated Swift code from the project, which gave typed access to scenes, named entities, notification triggers and Notify actions. Apple noted that a naming mismatch then appears as a compile error rather than a runtime crash. A Reality file can also be opened directly in AR Quick Look, and Apple demonstrated a full interactive scene built in Reality Composer without writing any code.

Reality Composer Pro

2023 introduction

On June 21, 2023, Apple released the visionOS software development kit and introduced Reality Composer Pro, "an all-new tool available with Xcode" that lets developers "preview and prepare 3D models, animations, images, and sounds" for Vision Pro apps. In the WWDC 2023 session "Meet Reality Composer Pro," presenter Eric Chiu introduced it as a "pro developer tool" for composing, editing and previewing 3D content, following the 2019 Reality Composer.

In that first version the tool opened from Xcode's Open Developer Tool menu, or a project was generated automatically by Xcode's app template for the headset platform (called xrOS in the June 2023 session). A Reality Composer Pro project is a Swift package. Its working files are Universal Scene Description (USD) files, and assets placed in the .rkassets folder are compiled into a framework that the Xcode app uses. The window has a viewport, a hierarchy panel, an inspector for RealityKit components, and an editor area with a Project Browser, Shader Graph, Audio Mixer and Statistics tabs. Assets can be imported, taken from a curated content library or created with Object Capture. The session also showed particle emitters, spatial, ambient and channel audio sources, and previewing scenes on the headset. Reality Composer Pro is a Mac application.

Timelines (2024)

At WWDC 2024 Apple added Timelines, which sequence built-in or custom actions to run in a set order or at set times. A trigger, such as a tap, starts a timeline. The same session listed other additions that year: lights, environment authoring, video docking, and the ability to deploy to iOS and macOS alongside visionOS. The Xcode 16 release notes list Timelines as a new Reality Composer Pro feature, along with docking regions for video playback and an expansion of texture coordinate sets from two to eight.

Reality Composer Pro 3 (2026)

Apple presented Reality Composer Pro 3 at WWDC 2026, held from June 8 to 12, 2026. In the main session, engineer JP said the new version "is no longer available as an Xcode developer tool"; it is downloaded from developer.apple.com and launched from the Applications folder. Apple's documentation describes it as an editor built on the entity component system (ECS) pattern that includes Shader Graph for materials, Script Graph for visual scripting, Compute Graph for GPU-driven simulations such as particles, Animation Graphs for character behaviors, a skeleton editor, an in-editor lightmap baker, and generative AI assistance. The documentation says this release "fully deprecates and removes the previous version of Reality Composer Pro" and provides a path for migrating Reality Composer Pro 2 projects. Apple's migration guide notes that Reality Composer Pro 2 projects contain USD scenes edited directly in the app, whereas Reality Composer Pro 3 "is not a USD editor"; its scenes are made of entities and assets.

The WWDC 2026 sessions also showed reusable prototypes with per-instance overrides, live preview on a connected Vision Pro through a companion app, lightmaps for baked indirect lighting, ambient occlusion and "beauty" lighting, and the Reality Composer Pro Assistant, which Apple says uses generative models to create 3D objects and materials from prompts. A second session covered plug-ins built in Xcode that expose custom components and systems inside the editor. It also explained that imported files are stored as JSON on disk, so teams can keep projects in git, and that scenes are exported to apps as Reality files. At WWDC, Apple said the live preview and plug-in features would ship later in 2026. As of October 2026, Apple's download page offers Reality Composer Pro 3 as a beta that requires macOS 26.5 or later, with a companion Reality Composer Pro Preview app for Apple Vision Pro. Apple's release notes describe it as a standalone app that is no longer part of Xcode and requires a Mac with Apple silicon. The Preview app is a free App Store download for visionOS 27, and Apple's documentation describes using it to preview scenes on a connected Vision Pro from the editor's Preview on Device option.

Tool	Platforms	Introduced	Distribution
Reality Composer	iPhone, iPad; Mac (Xcode 11 to 14)	WWDC 2019	App Store (iOS, iPadOS); bundled with Xcode on Mac until Xcode 15
Reality Composer Pro	Mac	June 2023	Included with Xcode, opened as a developer tool
Reality Composer Pro 3	Mac with Apple silicon, with a preview app for Apple Vision Pro	WWDC 2026	Standalone download from developer.apple.com (beta as of October 2026)

Use in research and education

Human-computer interaction researchers have used Reality Composer as a reference point when they compare AR authoring tools. In a paper at the ACM UIST 2023 conference, Neil Chulpongsatorn and co-authors grouped it with Adobe Aero as a tool that relies on predefined virtual models and predefined animations to create dynamic AR content. A CHI 2025 paper from Niantic and University College London listed the mobile apps of Adobe Aero, Reality Composer and Unity Mars as in-situ authoring tools, where users build and check content inside the target environment.

See also

• ARKit
• RealityKit
• USDZ
• visionOS
• Effect House