Can we use Reality Composer Pro for ARView?

Question

Intuitively I think Reality Composer Pro is more pro than Reality Composer. But when I followed the sessions for Reality Composer Pro, I found that when creating a new scene in Reality Composer Pro, no anchor is specified, so I'm thinking maybe these two tools may coexist in the future and the Pro one can only be used for Vision Pro?

Answer 1

Reality Composer Pro vs Reality Composer

You're absolutely right about using anchors in RCP - the new Pro app is designed in such a way that you can place a model into a scene without any anchor. Of course, this cannot be done in a non-Pro RC, where the anchor is a fundamental part of the scene. However, the usage of an anchor in RCP is not only about a certain scenario of model's appearance in a scene, but rather about the stability of AR tracking.

The good news is that both apps are able to coexist together in Xcode 15. You can even load the content of a .rcproject file (i.e. regular Reality Composer app) into visionOS RealityView. But you can't do the opposite – load .realitycomposerpro scene into iOS ARView.

RealityView { content in
           
    let rcScene = try! Experience.loadScene()
    content.add(rcScene.children[0])                // one level down

    print(rcScene.anchoring as Any)
}

To get both apps in Xcode 15, all you have to do is to move rc.app from Xcode 14 to the Xcode 15 Applications folder (Show Package Contents contextual menu) where rcp.app is dwelling.

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Are RCP and RC interchangeable?

The short answer is NO. I firmly believe that the main reason why RCP will never be available within iOS development is that it contains visionOS-specific technologies: such as hand tracking, indirect input target, USDA scenes' reader, optional use of anchors, a fundamentally different type of scene, brand-new ARKitSession class and DataProvider protocol (otherwise, Apple engineers will have to completely change ARKit for iOS, and this in turn will affect not only RealityKit, but also SceneKit, SpriteKit, Vision, etc. written in Swift and Objective-C).

Unlike Reality Composer for iOS, RCP for visionOS does not provide access to the character's skeletal system, although it does store bones' animation. And, unfortunately, Apple engineers have not yet added transform animation (a.k.a. Behaviors in RC) to RCP 1.0.

Also read this post.