What is an AR portal?
An AR portal is a virtual doorway rendered in augmented reality. When you look through it, you see the interior of a 360° panorama — as if you were peering into a real room. Walk through the doorway and the panorama surrounds you completely, creating the illusion of being transported to another place.
It's not a gimmick. AR portals give people a visceral, spatial sense of a place that flat images and even traditional virtual tours can't match.
Built on RealityKit
Teleport's AR portal uses Apple's RealityKit framework with PortalMaterial and WorldComponent — APIs introduced in iOS 18. The portal entity defines a boundary between your physical space and the virtual environment inside.
The door frame is generated procedurally using UnlitMaterial, which renders consistently regardless of lighting conditions. This is critical because environment probes take time to initialize — physically-based materials would appear black during the first few seconds.
Pre-warming the pipeline
RealityKit's Metal rendering pipeline requires initialization that can cause a black screen on first launch. To solve this, Teleport pre-warms the AR pipeline at login by rendering a hidden 1×1 ARView. By the time you open the AR tab, the GPU is already primed and the portal appears instantly.
This kind of invisible optimization is what makes the experience feel magical rather than technical. The user never sees a loading spinner — just a doorway appearing in their room.
Use cases
Real estate agents use AR portals to let buyers walk through a property from their living room. Event venues let couples preview wedding spaces before booking a site visit. Restaurants let diners check out the atmosphere before making a reservation.
AR portals turn every 360° tour into a spatial experience you can step into. And because they run on any recent iPhone, there's no headset required.