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.
In a welcome sign of rapid iteration, Apple has thrown out last year’s algorithm that turned flat photos into remarkably good 3-D ones, and replaced it with the same multi-layered spatial scenes that it’s featuring in lock-screen effects in iOS 26. The result is an image that doesn’t just look 3-D, but which adds more of a perspective change when you move your head toward the image or from side to side. It can’t reveal information that’s not really there, of course—there’s some smudgy generative filling going on in the background—but the effect is still impressive.
Another feature that’s more for the future than it is for today is support for consensual viewing of items when two people are using Vision Pro in the same room. Right now, it’s awfully unlikely that you and a friend are going to bring your combined $7000 in Vision Pro hardware together just to watch a movie or play checkers, but as more people get devices like this, you’ll need the ability to share widgets and objects and whatever in person, not just remotely. Apple has presumably implemented this feature by combining its existing SharePlay technology with the same stuff that powers geographic persistence.
In any event, I was able to manipulate a shared 3-D model of an astronaut in a space suit in collaboration with an Apple representative who was wearing his own Vision Pro, and we walked around it and gestured to it as if it was a real thing, because we both saw the very same VR object. I don’t know if I’ll use this feature any time soon, but it shows how Apple continues to build out features that it’ll need in its AR platform of the future.
I also got to live out an alternate life as an extreme sports enthusiast by watching some Insta360 footage, courtesy of visionOS 26’s new support for extremely wide field-of-view video formats from 180- and 360-degree cameras from the likes of Insta360 and GoPro. I was able to verify this with some 360 footage I shot myself (of people playing Dungeons and Dragons at a table, and not an adventurer parachuting into snowy backcountry—c’mon, this is me!). After opening the file in Files, visionOS asked if I wanted to convert it to a more Apple-friendly format, and began playing the video immersively.
There’s a new Spatial Browsing mode in Safari that answers the question, “What if Safari Reader, but in three dimensions?” When you enable Spatial Browsing, everything else drops away and you’re able to focus on a Safari Reader-like view of webpage text. As you scroll, images in the webpage are automatically converted and displayed as a spatial image, using the same algorithm you can use for your own photos. Is this feature necessary in life? No, but the very nature of visionOS makes me perfectly happy to witness Apple deploying a few wacky features and asking us, “Is this a thing?”
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to try one of the visionOS 26 features that excites me the most: support for hand controllers, namely the PlayStation VR 2 Sense controller. I’ve felt strongly for a while that Apple needs to expand what’s possible on Vision Pro by adding support for games. No, the $3500 Vision Pro is never going to be a game console, but by far the weakest thing about the platform is a lack of content—and there are plenty of VR games out there that could make the platform more appealing, especially if more affordable versions are coming eventually.
As always with visionOS, it comes back to the long game. As long as Apple keeps pushing forward and building out its AR platform of the future, I’ll be confident that the company is on the right track. visionOS 26 offers robust evidence that the work remains ongoing.
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