Скачать или смотреть Preview: Hosting 3D USDZ Content in iCloud for an AR App on iPhone using CloudKit and RealityKit

For a tutorial on the DC-Engineer.com blog, I have created a native SwiftUI app called "Txirimiri," which is a Basque word for a persistent light rain. The tutorial may be viewed at:

https://www.dc-engineer.com/how-to-ho...

Source code for the tutorial may be found on GitHub:

https://github.com/radcli14/txirimiri

The purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate how 3D content in USDZ format, such as models you created in Blender, can be archived on iCloud, and then loaded into your app at runtime using CloudKit. Then, they can be displayed in augmented reality (AR) app for iPhone, iPad, or macOS using RealityKit, with native tooling using SwiftUI.

For my example, I have prepared several models that I have created using photogrammetry of notable artifacts around Euskal Herria. Each is archived with a name, description, the actual model file, and a thumbnail image. All of this gets fetched and displayed, first as a menu listing available models, then as the full 3D model.

By using this approach in an AR app, you can significantly cut down on the osize of your build files, making your listing more appealing on the App Store. For example, a build file for Txirimiri is only 1.5 MB in XCode 26, while hosting over 100 MB of 3D data in iCloud to be downloaded on-demand.