// 2026.06.07

Unreal Engine on Vision Pro — Native visionOS and the Polyarc Fork

10:00 JST

Unreal Engine completes the Vision Pro engine picture for VisionDevCamp, alongside the Unity PolySpatial and native Swift routes. The common belief that “Unreal has no Vision Pro support, only forks” is out of date as of 2026 — and the accurate picture matters, because it changes what a hackathon team should realistically target.

The state of play in 2026

  • Epic ships native visionOS support in mainline UE — Experimental since UE 5.4 (full immersion), with mixed-immersion / passthrough added experimentally in UE 5.5 (Metal rendering, enabled once visionOS 2.0 opened it up). It is genuinely Experimental: expect bugs, performance cliffs, and breaking changes.
  • The prominent fork is Polyarc’s visionOS fork (released February 2026), based on UE 5.6. It fixes rendering bugs and adds performance features mainline lacks — fixed foveated rendering, mobile multi-view, layered render targets, reduced render-target memory, Crown-button suspend/resume — that roughly doubled effective GPU output in Polyarc’s testing. Polyarc shipped a real commercial AVP title (Glassbreakers) on it, and submitted a PR to merge the changes back into Epic mainline (~April 2026), so the gap may narrow during the year.

The realistic hackathon target

For a weekend project, aim at full-immersion VR. It is the solid, well-trodden path: a UE5 scene packaged to the headset, rendered with the Metal Desktop Renderer. Mixed-reality passthrough is possible but newer and fragile — it only arrived in 5.5/visionOS 2.0, and the underlying Metal-Compositor-Services passthrough has been reported to break in some recent visionOS betas. Treat passthrough as a stretch goal, not the baseline.

Build flow (native path)

  1. Toolchain: an Apple Silicon Mac, Xcode 15.3+ (the Polyarc fork supports Xcode through 26), an Apple Developer account, and a Vision Pro paired to the Mac.
  2. Engine: the native path works with stock UE 5.4/5.5; the fork requires building a custom engine from source — an hours-long compile, not a binary install.
  3. Renderer: use the Metal Desktop Renderer and disable iOS mobile rendering. Note that TSR (Temporal Super Resolution) anti-aliasing is too costly on Apple Silicon — a documented performance gotcha.
  4. Deploy: Package Project → Platforms → Vision OS, then in Xcode → Window → Devices and Simulators, select the Apple Vision Pro and deploy.

Caveats

  • Native support is real but Experimental — in both 5.4 and 5.5. Don’t expect production stability.
  • Full immersion is the reliable target; MR passthrough is fragile. Passthrough only arrived in 5.5/visionOS 2.0 and has broken in recent OS betas. For a hackathon, recommend full immersion and flag passthrough as may-break.
  • Real build pain. Apple Silicon Mac + Xcode + Apple Developer account + paired Vision Pro, and the fork means compiling a custom engine from source.
  • Access is gated. Unreal Engine source — and any UE fork — lives behind Epic’s access-controlled GitHub. Participants must link an Epic account, accept the UE EULA, and be granted access in advance; the fork repo is not publicly browsable for this reason.
  • It is not open source. UE forks inherit the Unreal Engine EULA, a custom Epic license — don’t call the fork “open source.”
  • Pixel streaming is a different, fallback path. Streaming UE content to AVP over WebXR is not native rendering and has historically had stereo-convergence and stuck-input issues — don’t conflate it with the native build.
  • Moving target. With Polyarc’s mainline PR pending, version specifics shift through 2026 — confirm the current UE and visionOS versions close to the event.

Questions? Reach the team via the Contact page.

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