GoKawiilSometimes I'll sit down and draw strange doodles in the air that hang and hover and spin if I tap them. I sketch them in midair with a thick, black spatial stylus made by Logitech called the Muse, while wearing Apple's Vision Pro headset.
The process feels like magic, and yet Apple often seems surprisingly indifferent to the opportunity. Pro-focused 3D creative tools that do 3D art like this don't really live on Vision Pro. And Apple hasn't bothered to make a spatial version of its own Pencil. This sense of half-finished frustration is exactly what makes the Vision Pro, now over two years old and in its second hardware iteration, sometimes feel dead.
But it's not. In fact, Apple is planning more of them. Smaller, lighter, but not for at least a few years, according to Mark Gurman's latest reports. Meanwhile, Apple's AI-infused smart glasses may not be arriving until at least late next year… and later still for display-enabled ones that might get some Vision-like features.
But as we head toward Apple's WWDC software conference next week, it's the perfect time for Apple to finally unleash the Vision Pro and its many latent possibilities. Not just for that device itself, but for all the things that come after it. AI included.
Apple's Personas use Gaussian splatting, a technology that's still an untapped part of VisionOS' possible future capabilities. Apple
More power under the hood than is being tapped
I'm fascinated by the idea of spatial computing -- specifically, floating screens and apps around me on demand. But what Apple has delivered so far is a limited subset of what could be. Apple's increasingly real Persona avatars are just one facet of that latent potential.
I know the possibilities because I look at and test products like these all the time and chat with people exploring solutions that don't exist yet. The Vision Pro has been perceived as Apple's greatest product failure under Tim Cook -- who do you know who owns one? -- but it's also widely acknowledged as the most advanced VR/AR device that exists. The M5 processor it uses, the eye tracking finesse it packs, the farther and nearer range motion sensor quality, the cameras that blend views of the world around you into pass-through video, they're all the best.
What isn't good is how the Vision Pro fails to implement all of this to deliver actually useful pro tools, and how it falls short in exploring the ideas Apple will have to solve in an expected range of AI-enabled wearables that don't exist yet.
I expect Apple to make glasses, camera-enabled AirPods, and maybe even a world-aware sort of pendant or pin. But in the meantime, the Vision Pro is a very real product that already packs a lot of these possibilities, if Apple only unleashed it.
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