Lens studio ui building

Building spatial UI in Lens Studio

Making good-looking, readable in-lens UI out of Text / Image / plane primitives. Pairs with lens-studio-sik-interactivity for making it tappable.

Text sizing is ~30–90, NOT centimeters

A Text component's size is a font-ish unit roughly 30–90 for normal UI, not world cm. A heading might be 46–72, a body line ~34–55, a button label ~25–30. If text is microscopic or invisible, it's almost always a size-unit misunderstanding, not a position bug. (If you build text from a script and it's tiny, multiply your intended sizes by ~14.)

The whitespace-background trap

A Text backgroundSettings panel (rounded colored fill behind the glyphs) will not draw for whitespace-only text. To make an image-only tile or a solid swatch from a Text background, give it a real glyph (a ".") and hide the glyph with textFill.color.w = 0. For anything bigger than a small square, don't use a Text background at all — use a textured plane (below).

Readable labels over busy/translucent backgrounds

White text alone vanishes over bright glass or the world. The universal fix is white fill + a dark outline:

outlineSettings.enabled = true        (boolean)
outlineSettings.size    = 0.5         (number; 0.25 is too thin, ~0.45–0.6 reads well)
outlineSettings.fill.color.{x,y,z}=0  (black; default is already black)

Optionally add dropshadowSettings for extra depth. This "caption treatment" makes any label legible on any background and is the single highest-leverage readability move.

Planes face sideways by default — rotate them

A PlaneMeshObjectPreset lies flat (horizontal). To make a card/button face the camera, set localTransform.rotation.x = 90. After that rotation: width = scale.x, height = scale.z, thickness = scale.y. Put backing cards behind content with a small negative local Z.

Glass / colored cards and pill buttons

• A frosted glass card is a rotated plane with a graph "liquid glass" material (see custom-shaders). Buttons sharing that same glass material blend into the card — differentiate them with strong label outlines, a slight scale/lift on hover, or a distinct (more opaque/tinted) material per button.
• A pill/rounded button = Text + backgroundSettings (cornerRadius, fill.color.*, margins.*) — but only for small labels with visible glyphs. A full pill = corner radius ≈ ½ the height.
• Compose a button as nested objects: Btn_X (root, holds transform + later the collider) → BtnBody (the glass/colored plane) + BtnLabel (Text) + Icon (Image or empty slot). This keeps each part hand-tunable and lets a nav script add interactivity to the root.

Images, icons, mascots: use an Image component, not a Text background

For anything wide or full-bleed, a Text-background texture tiles by world size (you get repeated bands; tileCount/textureStretch don't truly stretch). Use a textured plane instead:

1. Plane preset; rotation.x = 90; scale.x = width, scale.z = height.
2. Create an Image material (ImageMaterialPreset) — it has a baseTex slot and alpha-blends. (The plain Unlit preset has no texture slot.)
3. On the visual: mainMaterial = image-mat UUID (reference), then mainMaterial.passInfos.0.baseTex = texture UUID (reference). Optionally set Image baseColor to tint.
4. Layer with the visual's renderOrder — Image-material planes are depthTest-false, so they sort by renderOrder like Text, not by z. Give labels a higher renderOrder (e.g. 20) than their card so they draw on top.

For an icon/logo, make the SceneObject an Image (RenderMeshVisual + image material), not a literal Text object with a texture — Text-as-image fights you on sizing and the whitespace trap.

Rounded corners on a plane

Bake them into the PNG's alpha: draw your gradient/art clipped to a rounded-rect path on a transparent 32-bit bitmap (PowerShell System.Drawing works great for generating gradients, icons, and rounded buttons). The Image material shows the transparency. Overwriting the PNG in Assets/ hot-reloads it.

Layout sanity

• Know your card bounds: a card of scale.x=34, scale.z=48 (rotated) spans ±17 horizontally, ±24 vertically in its local space. Place children within that.
• Center a heading by setting the Text horizontalAlignment = 1 (center) and the object's position.x = 0. Left-aligned + off-center x is why a "title" reads like a corner label.
• The editor Preview camera reframes as scene content changes (e.g. disabling a big sibling). The UI itself is fine; just re-crop screenshots. Verify look in the Preview panel, not the Scene panel.

Billboard speech bubble over a target

A floating "speech bubble" that labels a mascot/object and stays readable from any angle is a small world-space Text driven by an UpdateEvent script. The durable shape:

• Billboard to the camera, yaw-locked. Each frame point the bubble at the camera with quat.lookAt(dirToCamera, up) — but zero the pitch/roll (build the look direction from the camera position with y flattened) so the text stays upright instead of tilting when you look up or down. Pure billboarding (full lookAt) makes labels lie back and get hard to read.
• Float above the target. Position it at the target's world position + a fixed up offset; follow the target each frame so it tracks if the target moves.
• Word-wrap + auto-shrink to a bounded panel. Word-wrap the text, then shrink the font size (sizing is ~30–90) until the wrapped block fits a fixed panel width/height — so long answers don't blow past the bubble.
• Grow upward from a fixed bottom edge. Anchor the bubble's bottom just above the target and let it expand up as text gets taller, so it never overlaps the target mesh (growing from the center would push the bubble down onto the mascot's face).

Give the text the white-fill + dark-outline caption treatment so it reads over the world, and a textured rounded-rect plane behind it for the bubble body.

UI Kit widgets (when you want them)

Instantiate prefabs (LabelledButton, LabelledToggle, FramePrefab, ScrollViewListItem) via InstantiateLensStudioPrefab; discover exact names with ListLensStudioAssets (ObjectPrefab). The visible label is a child "Label" Text — set its text and bump its renderOrder so it isn't occluded. Changing a UI Kit button _style can make the Label vanish (re-set text + renderOrder). ContainerFrame renders nothing until configured — for a quick card just use a colored/glass plane.