One of Apple Vision Pro's best tricks is that it can overlay elements on top of the world around you, whether that's placing countless apps in your space or overlaying a FaceTime call while you answer emails and browse the web. It's great, with smart stepping and a solid viewing experience, but equally amazing when the Vision Pro can transport you somewhere else.
The best way to do this is to use an environment in Vision Pro. You select a space and then use the Digital Crown to fully or partially immerse yourself. It's not just the ultra high fidelity views, you also get an accompanying audio track, like the whistling of the wind or the chirping of birds. You can also experience the absence of sound, with the lunar environment, for example.
Six of the 11 environments available in Vision Pro are real locations, while five are color effects that are applied over your surroundings. There's a tranquil, elevated view 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 still two mystery locations announced as Coming Soon, and they have been a mystery since their release. Here's my point: We're quickly 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. PT on March 10. June 2024. I want to see what those two environments are and I have a request for Apple that I think most Vision Pro owners will agree with.
Open the environments
Developers like Disney and Warner Bros Discovery have been creating environments, but there's a problem here… well, maybe two problems.
First of all, these third-party environments are locked for use in their respective applications. you look Avengers Endgame from the roof of Avengers Tower. your screen The Empire Strikes Back from a landspeeder on Tatooine within Disney Plus. How can you top that as a Star Wars fan? It transports you to a place you used to see only 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: there are no environments for Curb your enthusiasm? Not even a deli?
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, you'll simply return to the previous shortcut view or an environment created by Apple.
I hope visionOS 2.0, which is rumored to be unveiled during Apple's WWDC 2024, fixes this issue. More generally, I hope it gives us more advanced features similar to what we saw with the iPhone's huge second-generation software update.
A major Vision Pro update would just have to focus on the little things, like opening environments and allowing you to reorder apps on the home screen.
It would also be great to see Mac Virtual Display, the feature that projects your MacOS computer screen on Vision Pro, handle more than one virtual display.
Similarly, why not open up more iPad apps to run natively on the Vision Pro? Currently, it's an optional system for developers, but when the iPad was first released, all iPhone apps were available to 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'd also love to see some updates to Spatial Personas. Apple's most recent update really did a magic trick that made it feel like I could hang out with my friends who also had a Vision Pro and navigate the same space with them. It was mind-blowing at first, but it becomes more natural and I imagine Apple has a few more improvements up its sleeve.
There's a long list of things we want to see come to the Vision Pro, but I think expanding on what makes the device stand out makes a lot of sense. I'd suggest reading TechRadar's editor-at-large Lance Ulanoff's one-year retrospective analysis of Vision Pro; I agree with what you stated and have equally high hopes.
At the very least, if we get some fresh new environments and I can use existing environments in new places, I'll use the space computer a lot more. Who knows, maybe I'll write future stories from a landspeeder on Tatooine.
