As a nerd kid, this was one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. But I haven’t looked at the funny pages in many years, and had assumed this one had long since expired.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw a Foxtrot strip referencing Apple’s recently-launched Vision Pro.
Meta’s CTO says there are reasons Meta thumbed its nose at Google re: AndroidXR (something The Info reported this morning). He suggests Google’s talking shit about Meta behind its back and demanding “restrictive terms.”
I can see why Google might try: Oculus was once so willing to partner, it left Samsung and Xiaomi in charge of its mobile fate — and Google has a long, successful history of tying up partners with contracts in exchange for Google apps and a cut of search revenue. But does Meta need Google, or the other way round?
Joanna Stern writes in The Wall Street Journal that Apple’s face computer isn’t so great for work, but serves well as an escape from day-to-day life. You know, like a VR headset.
Still, even if the Vision Pro isn’t always magic, she finds it handy for focusing “on a single task, like writing a column.”
It’s about codecs and resolution. 4K-and-up videos only use either YouTube’s VP9 codec or the royalty-free AV1. Christian Selig, developer of the Juno YouTube app, writes that 360 video of the former can’t work because it requires Apple’s blessing. And the Vision Pro’s M2 chip has no AV1 hardware decoder, so that’s out, too.
Why not 1080p, he asks? Because it looks like doo-doo.
[christianselig.com]
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is South Korea-bound this week to discuss shipping a headset that incorporates webOS in 2025, Korean Economic Daily is reporting.
It’s not the first rumor that the companies might tag team the Vision Pro, and last month, LG confirmed that it was working on a new headset
The San Francisco Standard documents some parties where attendees are encouraged to shake their butts while wearing the Vision Pro (from pictures, it seems like most didn’t go along with the ask).
Before you dismiss the idea, consider this: If you don’t have a kid or a dog, “I gotta go; my Vision Pro died” could be a great excuse to leave a party early.
Meta announced Cryptic Cabinet on Thursday. The “open-source mixed reality showcase” serves as a reference app for developers who want to use its source code to make mixed reality games for the Quest headsets.
But it’s also a standalone game that generates furniture and other escape room puzzle elements in players’ environments. It’s available on the App Lab.
ESPN will start feeding VR content to the Meta Quest Xtadium app soon. That includes “immersive 180-degree VR” sports highlights from NCAA basketball and football games, interviews, and other content.
ESPN also says it will launch a Meta Horizon Worlds experience this summer. Whatever it is, it’s bound to make more sense than the ESPN phone.
Since the Vision Pro launched, we all knew intrepid first adopters would take the headset into the real world. However, the San Diego Police Department issued a safety reminder on Instagram that perhaps not every situation is suited for mixed reality.
“Keep those virtual experiences on the sidewalk, folks, and let’s cross streets the old-fashioned way — with our eyes wide open to the real world, unobstructed and without distractions!”
Nobody tell them about the dude wearing the Vision Pro in the Cybertruck.
Apple doesn’t sell a stand for the Vision Pro, so developer Christian Selig took it upon himself to create one — just like the unofficial YouTube app he made for the headset, too.
This stand allows the headset to hang vertically, making it take up a bit less space on your desk as opposed to some other storage options out there. Selig has uploaded all the design files onto MakerWorld, so you can 3D print the stand for yourself.
To celebrate the anniversary of GBA4iOS its developer, Riley Testut, has released a new Game Boy emulator for the Vision Pro, GBA4vOS. It currently supports emulation for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance.
The emulator lets you control WarioWare mini games by just rotating the window. And if you always thought the buttons on the Game Boy Advance SP were too small? There’s a giant solution for that too.
In this interview for the Voices of VR podcast, Apollo developer Christian Selig shares his experience creating Juno, an unofficial YouTube player he created for the Vision Pro in only a week’s time.
Despite the small number of people who own the headset, he says he’s earned enough from it to buy “multiple” Vision Pros.
I keep a pretty bushy mustache, and it seems to prevent the headset’s downward-facing cameras from seeing and translating what my mouth is doing to my Persona’s real-time expressions during a Vision Pro FaceTime call. Apparently, I’m not alone.
In fairness, Persona is still a beta feature. Maybe visionOS 1.1 will save my friends from this horror show.
While many people are excitedly entering Apple’s spatial computing future, some Vision Pro early adopters have already packed the devices up and sent them back for a refund. Reasons we’ve heard include eye fatigue, few useful apps available so far, and a lack of window / workspace persistence.
If you bought one on day one, the return window is closing now, so let us know if you’re deciding to keep your headset and why.
Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator are both making their way to Apple’s headset, developers Owlchemy Labs announced. They don’t say when the games will arrive, but they should offer a welcome stress reliever for whenever you’re not filling out spreadsheets or attending Zoom calls.
XR designer Greg Madison has created this chrome ball as a fun way to visualize how Apple’s headset can reflect lighting in augmented reality based on your real environment.
Reflection mapping is hardly new or unique to the Vision Pro, but Madison’s experiment is commendably easy to play with — just open the file in this Google Drive link while you’re wearing the headset.
Call me pessimistic, but I was sure Google would immediately slam the breaks on Christian Selig’s third-party YouTube app (especially now the company plans to make a YouTube app of its own). But Juno is still going strong, and Selig has just released its 1.1 version update. Improvements include a playback quality selector, drag and drop support, bug fixes, and other performance and UI tweaks.
[christianselig.com]
Valve Prism: the standalone Valve VR headset we’ve been waiting for? This convincing-at-first-glance site shows a chunky, heavy (850 grams!) headset with Vision Pro-caliber Micro OLED displays and claims of untethered PC-like graphics performance.
A quick jaunt into the site’s HTML code, though, repeatedly suggests the name of the company is “VaIve.” As in Vaive. As in, it includes a sans-serif letter that rhymes with “eye.”
The website also claims it offers “50-point lips, jaw, teeth, and tongue tracking.”
Update, 7:30PM ET: “Nope, this is NOT us,” Valve confirms.
If you get the USB-C-having developer strap for the Apple Vision Pro, you get more than the swole Lightning-esque connectors the headset already has, according to 9to5Mac.
Developers report that all of the pieces are detectable for a Thunderbolt connection; it’s just that Apple is limiting it to the 480Mbps max of USB 2.0.
The latest visionOS 1.0.3 update adds the option to erase the data from the Vision Pro and reset the device if you forget your passcode, as spotted by MacRumors. You could previously only reset the device by bringing it to an Apple store, making it a bit inconvenient.
It’s worth noting that Activation Lock will still be enabled when the device is reset, so if a thief gets ahold of the headset, they’ll still need your Apple ID to set it up.
Immersive Wire spoke to Vision Pro developers and found that apps like JigSpace, which was included in Apple’s press materials, got over 14,000 installs in the span of a week. Other apps have struggled to get past a 1,000-download threshold.
It obviously helps to be featured by Apple, but Immersive Wire reports some developers attribute lower download numbers to a lack of discoverability on the App Store. Developers say search capabilities need improvement, and the top 10 app lists should be easier to find.
So Mark Gurman wrote in the subscriber version of his Bloomberg Power On newsletter today. Not that we should expect any different. The iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch all get their big updates at about the same time.
Historically, that means a September visionOS 2.0 release. Also historically, Apple will crow about Vision Pro features it just can’t wait for you to experience at this year’s WWDC.
Some members of the Vision Pro team inside Apple think that, like the iPhone and Apple Watch before it, the headset won’t hit its stride until its fourth iteration, according to Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg.
That makes sense — as impressive as the Vision Pro might be already, it’s still a first-generation product with first-generation problems.
After announcing in December that it had deprecated Windows Mixed Reality, Microsoft has released a new Insider Preview Build (26052) without the feature.
The company writes in a blog post that Windows Mixed Reality headsets won’t work from this build onward, including for SteamVR and SteamVR Beta. Users can still use mixed reality headsets with Steam until November 2026 if they don’t update from Windows 11 version 23H2. “This deprecation does not impact HoloLens,” the company added.
[Windows Insider Blog]
We have been a bit disappointed by what we were able to achieve on VR with Assassin’s Creed, it did okay, and it continues to sell, but we thought it would sell more, so we are not increasing our investment on VR at the moment, because it needs to take off. We have been very impressed by what Apple came with, and we think it’s fantastic hardware, but we continue to look at this VR business as something that we have to look at but not invest too much in, until it grows enough.
Totilo’s right: no publisher has supported VR like Ubisoft. But it reportedly canceled Splinter Cell VR, and now this...
In addition to our detailed review, The Verge video team brought in Vox Media employees from different areas of the company to experience the Apple Vision Pro for the very first time.
See their reactions, including mine, right here. Let’s just say there were a lot of “whoa(s).”
Now that people have Apple’s headset, there are so many funny videos and interesting thoughts about it floating around out there, but there’s almost no mention of the goofy low-res eyes on the front that are supposed to make other people feel like you’re looking at them. Did this just not work? I’m dying to know what you all think.
Newly posted videos from the brand’s official YouTube channel suggest it’s got something planned for this year, even if the videos themselves mainly seem to be showing off footage and customer testimonials based on previous Star Wars and The Avengers VR experiences. With new owners Hyper Reality Partners having reportedly raised as much as $20 million in funding, hopefully The Void 2.0 has something interesting up its sleeve.
