In the Apple Vision Pro, that is. Disney Plus has rolled out a National Geographic edition virtual environment for its visionOS app that lets you watch movies in a snowy corridor in Iceland’s Thingvellir National Park.
The environment uses “3D models captured on-site using photogrammetry,” according to Disney’s announcement. When you watch a movie, it turns dark and shows you the Northern Lights!
Apple has released Lake Vrangla, one of two Vision Pro Environments that have spent months marked “coming soon,” and boy is it moody.
So what is Lake Vrangla? Well, it’s a small lake roughly 25 miles west (as the crow flies) of Oslo, Norway. You can see it fog-free on YouTube. Seems pretty!
Whatever this “Vision for you” is, the silhouette HTC shows at the end looks very pointedly Vision Pro-like, while also looking like it fits into the HTC Vive Focus 3 design mold.
The video hints at “a new kind of power.” Perhaps it involves that new Snapdragon XR2 Plus Gen 2 headset chip with 4.3K-per-eye resolution support, which Qualcomm said it’s working with HTC (among others) on.
Demos on this Meta blog show how the company will implement its promise to bring AI to its VR headsets. Like the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, you can ask it questions about things you see (in passthrough), and it will answer.
The experimental feature rolls out in English next month, in the US and Canadia (excluding the Quest 2).
An eagle-eyed Threads user spotted the glasses in a photo posted by Mark Zuckerberg in April, with the Meta CEO replying that more details will be shared “later this year.”
That checks out with Zuckerberg recently teasing that Meta was “almost ready” to reveal a prototype. Rumor has it Meta is planning to demo its “Orion” augmented reality smart glasses at Meta Connect in September.
The once-high-flying AR startup laid off its entire sales and marketing division this week, or about 75 people, several sources tell me. (Amazingly, Magic Leap had about 1,100 full-time employees before this.) The new strategy, sources say, is to become a component vendor for other companies looking to build their own headsets.
New Magic Leap CEO Ross Rosenberg didn’t respond to my request for comment on the cuts, but a company spokesperson told Bloomberg they were done “to better align with market dynamics and emerging opportunities.”
I’m now convinced of that after adding one using the free Dock Pro app. Now, some of the Vision Pro apps I use most (along with time and battery percentage) are just right there, waiting. Adding third-party apps is tricky and involves finding app URL schemes, though.
Don’t get me wrong; I like the hand flourish to open apps in the visionOS 2 beta. But sometimes, a dock is just better.
The Verge’s Adi Robertson already wrote about her experience with Distance Technologies’ prototypical heads-up display at Augmented World Expo. It’s nowhere near road-ready — it’s too dim, and the eye-tracking-driven stereoscopic 3D effect can be buggy, laggy, and tiresome.
Yet, for purely aesthetic reasons, I love the sci-fi future feel of this video from her time with it.
In its quest to build a cheaper headset, Apple has asked manufacturers for technical details needed to develop 2-inch or 2.1-inch displays with a pixel density of 1,700ppi (or about half the Vision Pro’s 3,386ppi), according to an Elec report cited by UploadVR yesterday.
Assuming the same aspect ratio, the outlet pegs the resolution “somewhere around 2600 x 2300,” or just over two-thirds that of the current headset.
The headset is now available to buy in China, Japan, and Singapore, with Apple documenting the international launch via a recent blog post.
The Apple Vision Pro will also roll out to Germany, France, Australia, the UK, and Canada on July 12th, with preorders for those regions available starting today at 5AM PT.
“Every person who I’ve shown it to so far is just like... their reaction is giddy,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in an interview. Perhaps at Meta Connect in September?
You can read more about Meta’s AR / VR roadmap in a report from last year by my colleague Alex Heath.
Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter looks at “difficult trade-offs” Apple has to make as it prioritizes a cheaper headset (including maybe relying on a tethered iPhone or Mac) and continues work on a second-gen Vision Pro.
He also described details of Apple’s “renewed” efforts on the wear-all-day lightweight AR spectacles dream that Meta and Google are also chasing:
Though a launch date around 2027 has been bandied about, no one I’ve spoken to within Apple believes the glasses will be ready in a few years.
Called the Logitech MX Ink, it will work on the Quest 2 and Quest 3, and can be used to draw in 2D on surfaces or 3D using “full 6DoF positional tracking,” according to UploadVR.
The MX Ink will have haptic feedback, pressure sensitivity, multiple buttons, and will support a double tap feature. Users will reportedly be able to seamlessly switch between it and Quest Touch controllers.
Previously an experimental feature, WebXR support is on by default for Vision Pro beta testers, RoadtoVR wrote last week. The open standard allows for VR and AR experiences on the web, such as those listed on this GitHub page.
However, the outlet writes that AR experiences do not seem to work quite yet, limiting it to fully-VR ones for now.
visionOS 2 also adds mouse support for additional workflow options, and Vision Pro will now reveal the user’s physical Magic Keyboard — even when they are fully immersed in an Environment or app.
I can’t wait to see my keyboard floating in the clouds like Falkor from The Neverending Story when visionOS 2 comes out this fall.
“Even Palmer would rather release a handheld than a VR HMD, just like Valve,” joked Valve watcher Brad Lynch, after seeing Luckey’s new Game Boy. (Valve context here.)
Luckey replied: “I am going to be announcing the fact that I am working on a new HMD at AWE!”
Augmented World Expo starts June 18th in Long Beach, California.
