---
name: Ornament
slug: ornament
category: component
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A small panel of controls that floats just outside a window edge in
  visionOS, staying with the window without covering its contents.
aliases:
  - name: window ornament
    source: community
tags:
  - overlays
  - platform-registers
  - windowing
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - hud-panel
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - spatial-ui
implementations:
  - system: hig
    name: Ornaments
    url: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ornaments
sources:
  - title: "Apple HIG: Ornaments"
    url: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ornaments
  - title: Creating Ornaments in visionOS, Create with Swift
    url: https://www.createwithswift.com/creating-ornaments-in-visionos/
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: controls must stay reachable without eating the content
---

In visionOS an ornament is a small panel that hangs off the edge of a window, floating
slightly in front of it, holding controls that belong to that window. It travels with the
window when the window is moved or resized, it is dismissed with it, and it is deliberately
outside the frame rather than inside it, so the content area stays whole. A video player's
playback controls, a browser's toolbar, a tab bar running down the leading edge: on that
platform these are all ornaments.

The word needs care on this site, because it already appears here in an older sense. When
the article on [art deco](/art-deco) talks about ornament it means decoration, the applied
pattern that is not structure. The spatial sense is a specific component name from Apple's
guidelines and has nothing to do with decoration: an ornament in this sense is functional,
and a decorative one would be exactly the wrong thing to hang beside a window. This entry
is about the [spatial](/spatial-ui) meaning only, and the generic English word is not the
term.

Two familiar components become ornaments by default when an app is built for the platform.
A [toolbar](/toolbar) moves below the window's bottom edge, and [tabs](/tabs) become a
vertical strip off the leading edge that widens to show its labels when the eyes reach it.
That default is the interesting part of the design, because it says something about why the
pattern exists. A window in a room is a fixed rectangle at a fixed distance, with no
scrolling the viewer can do to escape a control that sits on top of the thing they are
looking at. Moving the chrome outside the frame is cheap in a space that has no edges, and
the content keeps every pixel it had.

Treat it as chrome, not as content. Keep it to a few controls, keep them large enough to be
picked by [look and pinch](/look-and-pinch), and do not put anything in it that a reader has
to read at length or anything destructive enough to want a confirmation, since a panel
floating at the boundary of a window is easy to hit by accident and easy to lose track of.
The web has no direct equivalent, which is worth knowing when the word comes up in a design
review: a floating toolbar pinned outside a card is the nearest thing, but a page has no
window edge of its own to hang from, and no depth to offset into.