Another Cozy WWDC - visionOS This past Wednesday, developers from around the world joined Apple in-person and online for a day of visonOS talks. Apple's own Vision Pro evangelists gave presentations on designing for Vision Pro, best practices and some really cool examples which are on the App Store already. They also had chat running all day as they took questions for attendees. They closed the event with a live Q&A with the audience both in-house and online. No Spoilers, since Apple is...
11 days ago • 1 min read
BlueSky Weeknd https://go.bsky.app/9kfduUc This past weekend many of us fell into the BlueSky rabbit hole. I joined BlueSky back in July 2023, and it kind of sat on my iPhone waiting for people to post. I'd occasionally remember to cross-post along with Twitter, Mastodon and Threads. BlueSky was pretty much an afterthought. Then at the beginning of November, I started getting new followers en masse. During the first Sunday, the flood gates opened when I previously had around 100 followers....
16 days ago • 1 min read
Ultra-wide Display on Vision Pro & Mac Mini M4 This week the visionOS 2.2 beta and macOS 15.2 beta dropped, which includes the much anticipated Mac mirroring Ultra-wide Display on Vision Pro. This provides the Mac mirrored display with three choices; the original 16 x 9 ~40" 4K display, a wide display, and an ultra-wide panoramic display. I tried it out by installing the macOS 15.2 beta on an external SSD, while sitting at my 60" desk. The ultra-wide mode, wrapped around the desk on a huge...
26 days ago • 1 min read
Roll Your Own Immersive Video App In this Medium post, Anthony Maës outlines how Immersive Video is an experience second to none on Vision Pro. He includes instructions on using Mike Swanson's open-source SpatialPlayer to build your own apps. Check out the post here: OpenImmersive, the free and open source immersive video player.Even is you just want to try the Immersive video apps yourself, check out Indian cities in Immersive India, Explore London takes you on a quick look ath the sites...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Moving In Stereo A couple of interesting posts this week, the first up is from Gregory Wieber who posted a short video about visionOS 2.0's support for Pixar-invented subdivision surfaces that speed up rendering of 3D models - Subdivision Surfaces on Apple Vision Pro. That lead me down the rabbit hole to this older video explaining the TL;DR. Subdivision Surfaces: Overview.A few weeks ago, I mentioned StepInto.vision. A few days ago, a colleague was asking about passing values when opening...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Submersed In Immersive On Oct 10, 2024, Apple released Submersed on Apple TV+, a film made for the Apple Vision Pro. It tells a short story of young sailors on a submarine in WWII, which is under attack. While the audience for this film is currently small, the film represents the future of immersive story telling. I watched it when it premiered and can tell you it's unlike any other motion picture I've ever seen - and I've seen a lot. It's an amazing experience, with spatial audio effects,...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
RealityKit Pivot Points For the past month and a half, I've been mentoring students in the second Kodeco visionOS Bootcamp. One of the projects submitted involved creating a controllable robotic arm. The challenge was trying to figure out how to rotate or transform the robot arm Entities connected at a joint. The student figured it out eventually (see the links below).The very next day, we discovered that Apple WWDR had published a document and sample code about the new RealityKit 2.0 physics...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Neural Link? Called it! This week Meta introduced their XR Orion glasses. They resemble standard glasses with speakers and batteries in the arms, specially engineered holographic lenses and projectors. Using eye tracking and hand gestures. They are wireless, however users will carry a puck that does the computing and wear a neural link wrist band. I've been joking that the evolution of the Vision Pro will be an implant behind your ear as Apple will project visionOS into your head. Here are...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hacking on visionOS! Last weekend I was a mentor on the first Vision Hack hackathon organized by Cosmo Scarf, Matt Hoerl, and Brian Boyd. There were 185 participants, from 21 countries, creating 61 visionOS projects and sharing in $2,500 in cash and prizes. Snap rolled out their 5th edition Snap AR Specticals in Santa Monica. "Another step on the evolutionary path of spatial computing with the benefit of no cables and optical seen through HMD AR. The field of view is bigger than the last set....
2 months ago • 1 min read