Apple's Latest Vision Pro Tool Contains Traces of Defunct Game Engine 'The Machinery' - MacRumors

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Apple's Latest Vision Pro Tool Contains Traces of Defunct Game Engine 'The Machinery'

Tuesday June 23, 2026 7:34 am PDT by Tim Hardwick<br>The latest beta of Apple's Reality Composer Pro 3, the content creation tool used to build spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro, appears to contain traces of "The Machinery," an ambitious game development project that abruptly shut down in 2022 without explanation.

Based on code discovered by Nicolás Alvarez and independently confirmed by MacRumors, binaries included with Reality Composer Pro 3 beta contain at least 40 mentions of "the machinery" or "our machinery," and match aspects of The Machinery's project structure, asset management system, and database architecture.

The findings are notable because The Machinery was developed by Our Machinery – a company made up of veterans of the Bitsquid game engine. The project earned a devoted following among engine programmers for its unconventional approach to content creation workflows. And yet it disappeared without trace.

Central to the project was a system known as "The Truth," a database-driven architecture designed to unify assets, objects, dependencies, and editor state. Many of the same concepts appear in Apple's latest Reality Composer Pro release, announced during WWDC 2026. Things like reusable prototypes, live editing, asset dependency tracking, and rapid iteration workflows all pop up – ideas that have notable technological similarities to how The Machinery worked. The direct references in the code appear to confirm the connection.

The links don't just extend to code strings, either. Tricia Gray, co-founder and CEO of Our Machinery, now works on Apple's spatial computing developer tools team, as evidenced in her LinkedIn profile.

It's not clear whether Apple licensed The Machinery or acquired the company, or in some way inherited the referenced technology, but the presence of the identifiers throughout Apple's code suggests at least some of the project's ideas have somehow found their way into Apple's spatial computing development toolset.

The discovery is particularly notable because The Machinery's development ended so suddenly, surprising many developers at the time who had followed the project's progress. We've reached out to Apple to comment on the findings and will update this story if we hear back.

Related Roundup: Apple Vision Pro<br>Buyer's Guide: Vision Pro (Neutral)<br>Related Forum: Apple Vision Pro

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Top Rated Comments

MrMacintoshIII<br>2 hours ago at 08:20 am

Nice, this is one of those rare actually Macrumor mac rumors!<br>Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

benface<br>2 hours ago at 08:00 am

Wow! Love a good mystery. I think this is the start of something very big. Let’s dig, people! Get the best investigative reporters on this! Also, dips on the movie rights.<br>Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

TehFalcon<br>2 hours ago at 08:15 am

They obviously acquired them!<br>Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)

963852741<br>44 minutes ago at 09:32 am

AVP will be defunct before long.

It has more uses than foldable phone for 3000 large.<br>Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Taq'aix<br>2 hours ago at 08:37...