Hi all-

We've been exploring alternate approaches for text entry on visionOS, and my team has verified that the Spatial Keyboard is a viable alternative on visionOS and PolySpatial. This is a free solution available provided by Unity, and includes source code, allowing you to customize or even reskin the keyboard according to your needs.

To install it, please add the XRI package to your project, then install the *starter assets* and *the Spatial Keyboard* samples.

After doing so, you can drag the **XRI Keyboard prefab** under `Samples -> XR Interaction Toolkit -> 3.0.7 -> XRI Keyboard -> Prefabs` and drop it in the scene view. Then, for each input field you will need to add the `XRKeyboardDisplay` behavior and set appropriate references.

While we believe this offers a viable alternative for basic text entry in visionOS, there are some caveats:

* The XRI keyboard does not include built-in localization. You can address this in part using keyboard layouts (see `XRKeyboardLayout`)
* The XRI keyboard does not support emojis, auto-completion, or voice-based text entry.

The XRI keyboard is an alternative to, not a replacement for, the system keyboard, but hopefully some developers can work around blocking issues using this approach. If and when the visionOS system keyboard surfaces additional customization options, we intend to expose those for Unity projects as well.

Please reach out if you have further questions or comments!

Thanks,
--Tim

We’ve marked this bug “Won’t Fix” to be transparent about the fact that we unfortunately cannot fix it without Apple’s help, however much we’d like to. Their available system APIs simply do not provide affordances to manually position the system keyboard in 3D space, and the heuristics they use internally aren’t reliable for spatial content. We’ve raised this concern with them several times, even prior to our initial release, as we’re aware it’s a major issue.

Apples does listen to developer feedback–sometimes more closely than middleware feedback!–so I strongly encourage you to reach out to Apple support directly or through bugs to raise your concern about this issue.

In the interim, we are investigating other options, such as the possibility of implementing our own on-screen keyboard as an alternative to the system one. While I know it’s not a perfect solution, there are also onscreen keyboard solutions in the Unity Asset Store at a modest price from third parties. Another option is to implement your UI using Swift UI, which allows you to continue using Unity for 3D authoring but use Apple’s native UI, for which they provide greater support.

Please reach out if there’s more we can do to help; we really do want to fix this issue, but our hands are currently tied.