Steve Troughton-SmithMy custom satellite TV app works great on visionOS 👌
I can pick up a 70" virtual tv screen and wander round the house with it, or bring it to the moon or a desert island
One aspect of the Vision Pro experience that really fucking sucks is the Apple TV app.
Not because it's bad.
Because its contents are completely unavailable if Vision Pro isn't supported in your country.
That means no Apple shows, no Paramount+, no nothing. Deep links go nowhere.
You can sometimes play these TV shows and movies using the Apple TV website (but not always), but that's it.
The Apple TV experience is 75% of the value of a Vision Pro, and it's just not available to me in Ireland
I can understand the App Store not being available (though I disagree with that, too), but to lock away my access to the services I'm already paying per month for is a bit of a gut punch — especially when it's some of the only content Vision Pro *has* right now.
(I knew this going in, for the record, but now I've experienced it I want to share how I feel about it)
In other news, visionOS is *gorgeous* in practice. It’s easy to forget that when discussing it from afar
If you think Apple's immersive environments are cool, try Disney's. The Alien: Earth one is fucking terrifying. It genuinely feels close to real life in quality — no uncanny valley here. That's the first VR I've seen that I could believe
It’s kinda shocking to see just how few key developers support visionOS. For example, 2 years on and Dropbox is still completely unavailable on the platform. Good luck having productivity apps if you can’t access your files
Speaking of shocking, the visionOS 26 shell crashes to an Apple logo an alarming amount of times per day. It crashed while I was dictating audio, it crashed when I entered an immersive space in Disney, and it crashed when I tried doing a FaceTime call. I could tell the OS was in rough shape from the Simulator, but this is deep into unfinished territory
The displays in the Vision Pro are effectively perfect; I don’t think they would benefit at all from more pixels. What the device could really do with are much better cameras and optics. A variable focal distance would go a long way to making this feel great. The passthrough cameras though need to be 10X better for anybody to take them seriously. I still don’t know how Apple convinced pundits who tried this at WWDC23 that passthrough was as good as they claimed. Y’all need help
Passthrough vs in-headset content. It handles low light better than the Quest 3, but it's still not great
I’ve had the headset on for maybe 8 hours today, comfortably. It is so much heavier than the Quest 3, but there is effectively nothing in the OS that can make you motion sick…
…except for ‘Immersive View’ of spatial video. An optional mode in Photos, hidden behind a button — a button I would recommend never ever pressing, because only a couple seconds of that can make you very sick 🤮 Use it for stabilized fixed-perspective content only
One very zen thing to try on visionOS is to lie on your back and look at the stars in the moon environment at night
This much was obvious before, but Vision Pro has a massive input problem: text entry and editing *sucks*.
I still think the platform would benefit greatly from a combined keyboard/trackpad accessory, purpose-built, and that's the kind of thing Apple could and should build
Something that slipped my mind is that you can AirPlay iPad and iPhone screens to the Vision Pro, which is kind of cool. Sadly, it doesn’t support any kind of touch handling
I do wish you could capture multiple Personas and swap between them at will. Business, casual, etc
It is abundantly clear that Vision Pro is a developer kit, and the software and platform should have a 'beta' label. There are many big problems that need to be solved, and they will still take years of effort. Should it exist? Absolutely. There should be a high-end headset, a 'cheap' headset, and whatever happens with glasses — these are all different products, and they'll drive the ecosystem forward in different ways. Above all, Apple, start making peace with developers. Give them kits, and $
Every Apple Developer should be able to log into the developer site and order Vision Pro hardware, light seals in any size, and the developer strap. In every country.
It boggles the mind that they haven't taken this step already
FB20871373 — Every developer should be able to order Vision Pro from the developer site, in any country
I had a lot of complaints about the original version of visionOS, but they have addressed pretty much all of my most-critical feedback in the OS releases since. If they actually had a good-enough relationship with developers to fill this thing with software, it would be an incredible computing device.
With an empty App Store, though, it’s still merely an expensive toy. There are so many ways they could have fixed that in the time since launch, Apple just need to get over themselves…
3D RealityKit content in visionOS is kinda shocking. It feels real, completely believable. Like there’s a physical object floating in front of me. The way it reacts to light is wild, and how it reflects the view out of my (irl) window. I am shook
The more time you spend in visionOS, the more you fool your brain into thinking that these floating windows are physical objects in real space. The visual quality is that good. It's like a superpower, being able to summon 'UI' everywhere you go
I’m using Moonlight, which works pretty well, but I really wish I had Windows Virtual Display on visionOS as well as Mac Virtual Display so I could have both my Windows and Mac monitors side by side like in real life
I really love visionOS 26's ability to snap and align windows to flat surfaces, like walls, or monitors. Makes it really easy to replace my real displays with virtual displays
Seeing your own apps floating in augmented reality is a deeply emotional experience. I made this? Holy shit.
I made this? I made this
I’m really falling in love with visionOS, you guys
The Disney environments make me wonder what Pixar could do if they made a 'movie' (short, stage play, etc) entirely in RealityKit. The Monsters Inc Scare Floor makes me feel like I'm *in* the movie. Not in VR.
There is a level of fidelity here that's impossible to describe without being there yourself. No pixels, no discernible textures or polygons. You're just… there
Testing my apps from the top of a mountain feels kinda profound 😂
Speaking of which, I did bringup on my Broadcasts 4 codebase on visionOS, which was something I wasn't planning anytime soon
Not me wishing the visionOS moon environment actually had a moving, accurate starry skybox shader that syncs with the time of day. You can tell it's a flat texture, which is unsurprising
I've also tried to summon the visionOS Control Center via gesture in real life, or things from across the room 💀
This is the new forgetting your Mac doesn't have a touchscreen
I know plenty of people have complained about it, but it's a little infuriating to do visionOS development with Mac Virtual Display, because every time you build and run the app is spawned where you're looking (i.e. on top of the Mac) instead of where you last carefully positioned it.
I really hope they anchor that between runs in the future
Speaking of development — I'd kinda forgotten, but I have multiple [near-]release-quality apps ready to go for visionOS that I just never shipped, and actually seeing them here in-headset kinda gives me the urge to go for it
One area that visionOS really needs to improve in is occlusion. It's good, but it's not great, and it can be very distracting. Any time a virtual window clips objects in the real world, you're taken right out of the illusion. I envision a future version of the software that uses gaussian splatting perhaps to precisely mesh out your room to make this much better
There's a genuine disappointment at being back in the real world after using and working in visionOS for a few hours 😂 You get really used to being able to summon apps everywhere you go, and grab and fling windows to/from the next room over
Some of Apple's visionOS sample code is more evocative than others
This is Canyon Crosser
Now this is multiwindowing
Vision Pro battery life is so short that there's no time to have battery anxiety. If you're sitting at a desk, you probably want it plugged in in your pocket. You have enough time to walk around the house a bit, maybe cook a meal (which I've done, of course), but then it's wall time again.
Fortunately it charges pretty quickly, and doesn't discharge if used while plugged in.
Granted, my unit has a 2 year old battery, but somehow I doubt it's been used continuously for 2 years 😂
I had thought visionOS' guest mode might actually have its own user data if not a full-on account, but no it's just a temporary hand/eye config, an app ID filter, and automatic mirroring. All your data are belong to guest
So, so much of the visionOS experience could be vastly improved if Apple just convinced Netflix and YouTube to release their native apps.
Two companies.
Apple, you can figure out a deal with two companies, surely? Don't you have a master negotiator SVP? Why would you spend 7 years and billions of dollars developing a product and not be able to convince two partners to ship apps they already have?
Thom, exceedingly pure@stroughtonsmith Why waste manpower on like 5 users?
@thomholwerda Apple has a big pocket book
@stroughtonsmith Ballroom has higher priority.