Send Notification from SwiftUI Xcode 16 to trigger Reality Composer Pro Timeline Action Animation

Question

I am using Reality Composer Pro 2.0 and Xcode 16 beta for VisionOS 2 Beta.

I am able to see and trigger RCP Animation Component animations in a RealityView in Xcode by calling playAnimation on scene.availableAnimations[0] when a swiftui button is tapped, all good there.

I want to be able to trigger new Timeline Action animations from tapping a swiftui button as well, but I'm not sure the best way to access Timeline Actions to trigger them in code.

I see that I can send a Notification from Xcode that will trigger a timeline action (as shown in screenshot), but I'm not sure how to send a notification from SwiftUI to RCP to trigger this "SpinAndMove" Timeline animation.

If anyone could help send a notification from SwiftUI to RCP or if there's a better "best practices" method to trigger Timeline Actions from outside of RCP, it would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

This was answered on the Apple developer forum: https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/756978

That post describes how to do the notification with VisionOS, but I was able to get it to work on a macOS target with:

if let scene = appModel.contentEntity?.scene {
  NotificationCenter.default.post(
    name: Notification.Name("RealityKit.NotificationTrigger"),
    object: nil,
    userInfo: [
      "RealityKit.NotificationTrigger.Scene": scene,
      "RealityKit.NotificationTrigger.Identifier": "insideFlip"
    ])
}

Where insideFlip was the Notification Name defined in Reality Composer Pro, and appModel.contentEntity?.scene was defined inside RealityView.

if let immersiveContentEntity =
    try? await Entity(named: "Immersive", in: realityKitContentBundle) {
  appModel.contentEntity = immersiveContentEntity
}