If Apple adds this to Vision Pro, I might finally embrace it for good
One of Apple Vision Pro’s best tricks is that it can layer elements around the world around you, whether you’re placing a large number of apps in your space or overlaying a FaceTime call while responding to emails and surf the internet. It’s very cool, with smart throughput and a robust visual experience, but just as great if the Vision Pro can transport you somewhere else.
The best way to do that is to use an environment on Vision Pro. You select a room and then use the Digital Crown to move along all or part of it. It’s not just the vistas in ultra-high fidelity, you also get an accompanying audio track, such as the whistling of the wind or the chirping of birds. You can also experience the absence of sound, for example in the lunar environment.
Six of the eleven environments available on Vision Pro are real locations, while five are color effects that are overlaid on your environment. There are peaceful, high views from Haleakalā, a huge landscape in Yosemite and Joshua Tree, and you can also go to White Sands, Mount Hood or even the moon, where you also have an astronaut’s view of the Earth.
There are still two mysterious locations announced as Coming Soon, and they have been a mystery since launch. Here’s my point: We’re quickly approaching Apple’s WWDC 2024 event – it’ll be a weeklong developer conference, but all eyes are on the opening keynote scheduled for 10am ET/1pm PT on June 10, 2024. I I want to see what those two environments are, and I have a request for Apple that most Vision Pro owners will agree with.
Open the environments
Developers like Disney and Warner Bros Discovery have created environments, but there’s a problem here – well, maybe two problems.
First, these third-party environments are locked for use in their respective applications. You’re looking Avengers: Endgame from the roof of the Avengers Tower. You screen The empire strikes back of a landspeeder on Tatooine within Disney Plus. How can you top that as a Star Wars fan? It takes you to a location that you previously only saw on the silver screen. With the Max app you will be transported to the Iron Throne Room of Game of Thrones. Which brings me to my second problem: no environments for it Do you control your enthusiasm? Not even a deli?!
You can only access these environments within their respective applications, so you cannot do any work from Avengers Tower, the Monsters Inc. Scare Floor or a galaxy far, far away. When you exit the application, it simply returns to the regular old passthrough view, or to an Apple-made environment.
I hope that visionOS 2.0, which is rumored to be unveiled at Apple’s WWDC 2024, will fix this. More broadly, I hope it brings us more advanced features, similar to what we saw with the iPhone’s massive second-generation software update.
A major Vision Pro update should only be about the little things, like opening environments and reordering applications on the home screen.
It would also be great to see that Mac Virtual Display – the feature that projects your MacOS computer screen into the Vision Pro – can handle more than one virtual screen.
Similarly, why not open more iPad apps to run natively on Vision Pro? Currently it’s an opt-in system for developers, but when the iPad first launched, all iPhone apps were available to use with the simple window magnifier in the bottom corner. It might not be a perfect experience, but it would let people do more with Vision Pro.
I’d also like to see some upgrades to Spatial Personas. Apple’s most recent update really pulled off a magic trick that made it seem like I could hang out with my friends who also had a Vision Pro and navigate the same space with them. It was trippy at first, but it’s becoming more and more natural and I imagine Apple has some improvements in store.
There’s a long list of things we’d like to see come to Vision Pro, but I think it makes a lot of sense to expand on what makes the device stand out. I suggest reading Ny Breaking Editor-at-Large Lance Ulanoff’s one-year retrospective on Vision Pro; I agree with what he has stated and have equally high expectations.
If we get some fresh new environments and I can use existing environments in new places, I will at least use the spatial computer a lot more. Who knows, maybe I’ll write future stories from a landspeeder on Tatooine.
