One of Apple Vision Pro’s best tricks is that it can overlay elements in the world around you, whether that’s placing a myriad of apps in your space or overlaying a FaceTime call while you answer emails and browse the web. It’s very cool, with smart relaying and a robust visual experience, but equally amazing when the Vision Pro can transport you somewhere else.
The best way to achieve this is to engage an environment on Vision Pro. You select a space, then use the Digital Crown to partially or fully immerse yourself. It’s not just the ultra high fidelity views, you also get an accompanying audio track, like the wind whistling or the birds chirping. You might also feel the absence of sound, with the lunar environment for example.
Six of the 11 environments available on Vision Pro are real-world locations, while five are color effects applied to your environment. There are peaceful, elevated views from Haleakalā, a huge landscape in Yosemite and Joshua Tree, and you can also venture to White Sands, Mount Hood or even the Moon, which includes an astronaut’s view of Earth .
There are two more mystery locations announced as coming, and these have remained a mystery since launch. Here’s my point: We’re fast approaching Apple’s WWDC 2024 event – it’ll be a week-long developer conference, but all eyes are on the keynote scheduled for 10 a.m. ET/1 p.m. HP on June 10, 2024. I want to see what these two environments are like, and I have a request for Apple that I think most Vision Pro owners will agree with.
Open 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 down for use in their respective applications. You look Avengers: Endgame from the roof of Avengers Tower. Your screen The Empire Strikes Back of a land speeder on Tatooine within Disney Plus. How can you do better as a Star Wars fan? It transports you to a place you only saw on the big screen. With the Max app you can be transported to the Iron Throne Room from Game of Thrones. Which brings me to my second problem: no environment for Calm your enthusiasm? Not even a delicatessen?!
You can only access these environments within their respective apps, so you can’t work from Avengers Tower, Monsters Inc. Scare Floor, or a galaxy far, far away. When you close the app, it just goes back to the regular old passthrough view or an Apple-made environment.
I hope visionOS 2.0, which is rumored to be revealed at Apple’s WWDC 2024, will solve this problem. More broadly, I hope this will give us more advanced features similar to what we saw with the iPhone’s huge second-generation software update.
A big Vision Pro update should only be about small things, like opening environments and being able to rearrange apps on the home screen.
It would also be great to see Mac Virtual Display – the feature that integrates your MacOS computer screen into Vision Pro – handle more than one virtual display.
Likewise, why not open more iPad apps to run natively on Vision Pro? Currently this is an opt-in system for developers, but when the iPad launched, all iPhone apps were available for use with the simple window magnifier in the bottom corner. It may not be a perfect experience, but it would allow people to do more with Vision Pro.
I would also like to see improvements to Spatial Personas. Apple’s most recent update really did a magic trick that made me feel like I could hang out with my friends who also owned a Vision Pro and navigate in the same space with them. It was trippy at first, but it’s becoming more natural, and I imagine Apple still has some improvements to make.
There’s a long list of things we want to see happen in Vision Pro, but I think it makes a lot of sense to expand on what makes the device great. I’d suggest reading TechRadar Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff’s one-year look back at Vision Pro; I agree with what he laid out and have equally high hopes.
At a minimum, if we get new new environments and I can use the existing environments in new places, I’ll use the space computer a lot more. Who knows, maybe I’ll write future stories aboard a land speeder on Tatooine.
