By Jason Snell
visionOS 26 keeps pushing Apple’s newest platform toward the future
My visionOS 26 persona. The side of my head really does look like that!
If visionOS and the Vision Pro are all about charting a course to the future of wearable devices in front of our eyes, Apple needs to keep pushing toward that future at every opportunity. Fortunately, visionOS keeps moving forward, with several substantial feature improvements that have rolled out in updates over the past year-plus.
With visionOS 26, Apple keeps pushing, as it should. Apple had already taken its most uncanny launch feature (the dead-eyed Personas) and made it shine with a software update; it could have paused there for a while, but instead, visionOS 26 ups the game.
Spatial Personas are now the default, and there’s an entirely new Persona engine that makes them look remarkably better. The old Personas looked good straight on, but from a bit of an angle, they looked like a face tacked on to a flat piece of cardboard or something. These new Personas capture more of the side of the head, capture hair and eyelashes better, and do an incredible job of capturing skin details. Unfortunately, while beards look better, they still limit a Persona’s mouth movement.
Another drive forward is geographic persistence. In the long run, assuming AR glasses are a thing (which is what we’re all assuming here, because that’s why this whole project exists), you’ll want to be able to place an item somewhere and have it appear there when you come back to it later. In previous versions of visionOS, there was basically no item persistence at all—if you rebooted the Vision Pro, all your windows were closed, and you needed to set them up again.
visionOS 26 fixes all of that. Now you can leave items in one place and they’ll appear when you enter that space, even if the Vision Pro has rebooted or shut down in the interim. Windows are always where you left them. It’s great for short-term reusability, and a must if you take the long view.
A big beneficiary of geographic persistence is the new ability for visionOS to use widgets from other apps. visionOS will let you place widgets on physical surfaces like walls, where they’ll remain anchored. I’ve really enjoyed using Widgetsmith to place a clock on my ceiling or Windora to put a picture-that-looks-like-a-window on my wall, but without persistence, I gave up. You can browse widgets by launching the new Widgets app and then placing them wherever you want. There are a few beautiful and subtly three-dimensional clock widgets, a photo widget that basically Sherlocks Windora, and many more.
Immersive Environments (the desktop wallpaper of visionOS) are another favorite feature, and I admit that I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t add a bunch of new Environments to the mix, nor apparently enable third-party developers to contribute their Environments to the system as a whole. But the one new Environment Apple is adding also shows off some new extensibility and interactivity: the Jupiter environment, which I got to try briefly, lets you adjust how fast time passes (do you want to stare at Jupiter’s gas bands swirling rapidly, or do you need to slow it down to get some work done?) and jump to different points during Jupiter’s day. As with so many aspects of visionOS, all I can say is: this is great… more, please.
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