visionOS supports fully photo-realistic, spatially-aware 360Ā° immersive environments with true depth, parallax, spatial audio, and motion ā going far beyond static panoramas. Developers can now surface these environments on both native visionOS apps and the spatial web.
ā¢ visionOS 3 extends immersive environments to the spatial web, allowing web pages to trigger full immersion via new WebXR/spatial APIs
ā¢ New design guidance codifies the 81Ā° primary FOV, the 1-meter camera height standard, and the 40 px/degree sharpness target
ā¢ Motion and spatial audio attachment to individual mesh layers is now a first-class workflow in RealityKit, replacing manual anchor hacks
ā¢ System environments (Haleakala, Moon, Jupiter, etc.) demonstrate a layered-mesh parallax model that third-party environments can now replicate with documented APIs
ā¢ True parallax and depth separation (not just a skybox) means users perceive genuine 3D space, raising the bar for presence and immersion in your app
ā¢ Environments can be tailored per app purpose ā media viewing, productivity, creative tools ā with controllable lighting, audio anchors, and animated scene elements
ā¢ Spatial web support means a web-based experience can launch a full immersive environment without requiring a native app install
Liquid Glass is Apple's new material and visual design language introduced in iOS 27, bringing translucent, refractive glass-like surfaces to system and custom UI elements. It replaces the frosted vibrancy aesthetic with a more dynamic, depth-aware material that responds to content beneath it.
iOS 27 introduces new SwiftUI drag and drop APIs including reorderable, reorderContainer, dragContainer, and configuration modifiers that enable reordering within and across collections, multi-item drag, and fine-grained control over how data is transferred during drag and drop operations.
PaperKit is Apple's full-featured canvas framework ā previously internal-only ā now publicly available in iOS/macOS/visionOS 27. It powers the drawing and markup experience in Notes, Preview, and Freeform, giving developers access to a complete pencil, shapes, images, and text canvas with a rich data model.
In-depth guide
RealityKit & USDKit in iOS 27 āiOS 27 enforces stricter adaptivity requirements for UIKit apps, making iPhone apps fully resizable in iPhone Mirroring and on iPad, while introducing new navigation bar minimization controls, sidebar opt-in for iPhone tab bars, and prominent tab customization.