MegaUIKit — summoning the Specs sample library out of mid-air

Snap’s Essentials template for Specs ships fourteen sample groups — Solvers, Instantiation, InteractableHelper, Raycast, Collision, Mini Demos and the rest — laid out as top-level scene objects, most of them disabled. Browsing them means hunting through the Scene Hierarchy panel, toggling one on, toggling it off, and repeating. MegaUIKit replaces that loop with a holographic floor menu you can use from inside the headset.

A board sits about a foot off the ground, tilted back so it never occludes what it summons, one tile per sample group. Look at a tile and it lifts and brightens, with a spinning 3D title floating above it. Pinch it and its examples unfurl as a menu in a frame you can drag anywhere. Pinch an example and it materialises into the scene. Pinch again to dismiss. Opening anything closes whatever was open before — without that rule the scene silts up with five samples fighting for the same volume of air and no way to tell which behaviour belongs to what.

Three skins — Terminal (cyberpunk), Gilded (steampunk) and Neon (Neo-Tokyo) — each with its own palette, typeface, motion language and sound, switchable from inside the scene.

Design notes worth stealing

Nothing about the sample library is hardcoded. The menu builds itself by walking the live scene; disabled objects are still present in the hierarchy, so a dormant sample is fully enumerable even though none of its scripts have ever run. Add or rename a group in the Editor and the menu picks it up next launch — no manifest.

The catch, learned the hard way: runtime roots are not authored roots. By the time the menu builds, packages and editor tooling have added scene roots of their own. The first build listed 18 groups instead of 14 and its clean-scene pass silently disabled the MCP preview agent. Roots are now filtered by naming convention and by having at least one child.

UIKit does the interaction; the skin is a layer on top. Tiles and rows are UIKit Buttons, not hand-rolled quads — which buys the hover/press state machine, auto-fitted colliders, gaze and pinch targeting, and SnapOS theming for free. That’s the difference between a menu that looks like Specs UI and one that behaves like it.

Themes are data, with an escape hatch. Every colour, radius, easing name, stagger time, font and sound lives in a MenuTheme object. Three behaviours genuinely resist being data — Terminal’s character corruption, Gilded’s hinge tilt, Neon’s bloom — and those are named by enum and branched on, rather than pretending a field could describe them.

Live inputs come from reflection. Object.keys on a ScriptComponent returns its @input fields and writes to them stick, so an active sample’s boolean inputs appear as toggles you can flip while it runs — no author-time manifest. The limits are stated plainly in the README: a script that reads its inputs once in onAwake will ignore the edit, and @hint text and numeric ranges exist only in the Editor API, which is why it’s booleans-only for now.

Requires Lens Studio 5.22+. Target platform is Spectacles; there is no Snapchat-camera path. Source on github.com/IoTone/MegaUIKit-SPECS.