Creating immersive views on visionOS using AI-generated 360° images, SwiftUI and RealityKit

Overview

One of the many challenges with creating virtual and augmented reality applications for visionOS is the cost of 3D content creation. Bespoke 3D scenes for every part of an application are slow and expensive to produce. The approach we’ve taken at Serendipity AI is to reserve full 3D experiences for a few key moments, and use 360° images plus a small bag of 3D manipulation tricks to deliver immersive views everywhere else — convincing enough that users don’t notice the seam.

Topics covered

In this article we walk through:

1. What an immersive view is and how to design one
2. How to create a realistic immersive view from a 360° image
3. How to modify the approach to load images dynamically via URL

The full write-up — with code, RealityKit setup, and screenshots — lives on Medium.