4 visionOS 3 features Apple needs to get people interested in Vision Pro again

Vision Pro has been a flop, plain and simple. By most accounts, it is not even close to meeting Apple’s own meager internal sales expectations. And worse, it is out of the public consciousness entirely, to where even Apple fans often forget about it.

Better, cheaper hardware is one way to breathe more life into “spatial computing,” but since that’s not coming soon, Apple needs to double down on software. VisionOS 2 felt like visionOS 1.4 than a major step up, probably because it came so soon after the headset’s release.

VisionOS 3, which will be announced at WWDC on June 9 and released later this year, is the first real opportunity for Apple to fully address feedback from actual customers and developers. If they want us to start strapping on the headset every day, these are some of the things we want to see.

Work smarter

My biggest issue with the Vision Pro is that it’s just bad at anything that isn’t 3D video or mildly interactive entertainment. When it comes to productivity, and that includes not just business spreadsheets but also taking notes, managing my calendar, or researching which coffee grinder to buy, it’s awful.

It’s difficult to run multiple apps at the same time without difficult context-switching between them, and the windows all take up way too much space. Entering text is slow and painful. You can hunt and peck with your eyes on a virtual keyboard or use voice transcription, which never works as well as it should. Of course, you can always use a Bluetooth keyboard, but moving your hands between interacting with the visionOS interface and down to the keyboard is tiresome. And the video passthrough struggles enough in low light that it can be hard to see your keyboard clearly.

Obviously, this isn’t an easy problem to solve, but it’s pretty damning that the best way to be productive with your Vision Pro is to use it as a virtual display for a Mac, which is the device you’re actually being productive with.

One productivity problem that does seem easy to solve is the need to chase down an application window’s location in physical space (or else reset/rearrange them all). The way Vision Pro anchors a window in space is impressive, but what if I don’t want a window to stay in the physical space I set it? What if I want it to follow me as I walk around? Anchoring a window to the user, rather than the environment, should be a quick toggle I can flip on every new window.

Walking around with my open apps following me automatically while keeping my hands free is a productivity feature no phone, tablet, or laptop could match.

Embrace reality

For a platform that is all about “spatial computing,” there are far too many apps that are anything but. Many Vision Pro apps, including Apple’s own, are just big flat floating windows. I don’t need an entirely new platform and a $3,500 device to run iPad apps as though they were five feet wide.

The notable exceptions are 3D video and games, but I can’t understand why the Clock app, for example, is literally a compatible iPad app. How on earth does the Clock app not allow me to hang a virtual clock on the wall, or click a virtual stopwatch in my hand?

The Mail app could have a view where you open a virtual mailbox to open to check your messages. Find My could show a little virtual overhead 3D view, like looking down on a model town (even an unpainted one) with the person or device in question highlighted. The TV+ app could let you place a virtual TV set in your home (with various models through the ages) and place a remote in your hand. Photos could put an album of images into an actual virtual photo album object, where you flip pages and scribble in the margins.

How cool would it be to be able to map Home app controls to the actual lights, plugs, and switches in my house, so you can seamlessly control those smart home devices as I walk around without opening up an app or window? Even if it’s not the ideal way to get things done, cool little virtual reality touches would do a lot more to sell the idea of spatial computing than the current floating windows do.

Stack the deck

In visionOS, every new application, and every window within an application, is a separate floating billboard hanging in the air around you. With just three or four windows open I have to turn and look in all directions to simply move from one app, or one window, to the next.

Contrast that with a Mac screen, where windows layer on top of each other, and switching between applications is a keyboard shortcut or click away. On my MacBook, I often run windows maximized and on separate desktop spaces, where I can switch between them with a multi-finger swipe on the touchpad.

I can have a dozen browser tabs and 10 different applications open, and they all occupy the same 27-inch monitor. I can context-switch without turning my head around and moving to see anything, and when I want to not be working, it’s as simple as not looking at my monitor.

Vision Pro needs a solution for this. Apple needs to let multiple applications live in a single window “stack” that I can flip through the way someone flips through index cards full of notes when giving a speech. And I need a quick gesture that hides everything when I want to pay attention to the real world briefly and brings it all back in an instant.

Get serious about fun

We get it, Vision Pro a superb 3D video viewing device. But that’s never going to be the main draw of a headset, not until Vision Pro is so ubiquitous that two or more people can watch things together in the same space.

Apple could start by allowing two people wearing Vision Pro headsets to see the same virtual screen in the same environment. Let me have a movie night with my wife on a virtual beach while we both watch the same giant floating screen up over the waves. I don’t want to see her Persona, I want us to be physically present and watching the same thing in the same place.

Pople love VR for gaming, and the gaming situation on Vision Pro is even more dire than it is on the Mac. There’s a relatively small selection of games that fit firmly into the “lite mobile fare” category and nothing that makes you think this device could possibly cost what it does. So-called “real gaming” needs controllers. You need to push buttons, pull triggers, and precisely track hand movement and orientation in a way that is beyond the lauded hand-tracking capabilities (and latency) of visionOS.

Apple is allegedly considering supporting PlayStation VR controllers on Vision Pro. That’s an awesome idea, and one they should really run with—make it the de facto “default” gaming controller for Vision Pro. Sell them at Apple Stores. Make it an add-on accessory at the point of purchase. Work with Sony to publish some Playstation VR games on Vision Pro the way they publish some of their Playstation games on Windows PCs. Talk with Valve about making Vision Pro work as a wireless Steam VR headset.

And Apple should stop fighting with Microsoft and others over game streaming and let them put an Xbox app on Vision Pro that allows users to play streaming Xbox cloud games on a big virtual TV. The company’s principled stance about app stores isn’t protecting its customers, it’s protecting its revenue cut at the expense of making other hardware better for gamers. Vision Pro and visionOS need as much content as it can get, and relaxing the rules on third-party app stores will make it happen.