{"id":176166,"date":"2025-06-11T16:55:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T16:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/176166\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T16:55:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T16:55:09","slug":"okay-apple-vision-pros-spatial-personas-dont-look-like-trash-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/176166\/","title":{"rendered":"Okay, Apple Vision Pro’s ‘Spatial Personas’ Don’t Look Like Trash Anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the average person, $3,500 is still too much money for Apple Vision Pro<\/a>. The price is even more exorbitant when you compare it to a $300 Quest 3S<\/a> or $500 Quest 3 headset<\/a> with similar VR and XR capabilities, though the visual fidelity and responsiveness are not on the same level. At WWDC 2025<\/a>, Apple announced visionOS 26<\/a> with a slew of new features, including \u201cspatial Personas,\u201d widgets that you can anchor into your physical space like your walls, and a new spatial web browsing feature that converts 2D photos on websites into 3D ones. As genuinely cutting-edge as these features are (I kept saying \u201cwow,\u201d \u201cwhoa,\u201d and \u201choly sh*t\u201d my entire demo time), it still costs you three-and-a-half grand to experience them.<\/p>\n

When Apple Vision Pro launched last year and then added spatial Personas\u2014a 3D-generated avatar of yourself that can be used during FaceTime or in a virtual meeting\u2014everybody laughed at them. Literally pointed and (in Nelson Muntz\u2019s voice) Ha-Ha-ed at how comically bad they could look. Many people\u2019s Personas had holes in the back of people\u2019s heads, hair without volume, and skin tones that looked just a bit too bright and clinical. And despite resembling the uncanny valley, there was something just a bit off about them. Here\u2019s what my Persona looked like at the time:<\/p>\n

\"Gizmodo\u00a9 Raymond Wong <\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy to report that spatial Personas are getting a, um, major facelift (pun intended). The capture process still involves holding the Vision Pro in front of you and using the cameras to 3D scan your face, but the detail of the avatar is so much more realistic. Here\u2019s what my new spatial Persona looks like in visionOS 26:<\/p>\n

There are still some imperfections (like the crookedness of my striped shirt), but my face\u2014my god\u2014it\u2019s almost like staring into a mirror. My long hair part was rendered accurately, and when I smiled and laughed, my teeth, cheeks, and eyebrows moved more naturally as opposed to before, which was kind of stiff. My Persona no longer looks like a PS3 character. If you\u2019re paying $3,500 for Vision Pro, your virtual self damn well better look more realistic than a console from almost 20 years ago!<\/p>\n

Apple\u2019s not saying what it did specifically to improve the quality of Personas (perhaps using more polygons?), but here\u2019s what the press release<\/a> says: \u201cTaking advantage of industry-leading volumetric rendering and machine learning technology, the all-new Personas now have striking expressivity and sharpness, offering a full side profile view, and remarkably accurate hair, lashes, and complexion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest of my Vision Pro demo was comparably mind-blowing (as Vision Pro still tends to be), but it also further drove home the fact that you need to have deep pockets in order to enjoy visionOS 26. I saw various widgets\u2014clocks, calendars, a Lady Gaga poster that I could pinch with my fingers to play music, and even a framed window with a #shotoniPhone panorama of Japan\u2019s Mount Fuji that I could look \u201cinto.\u201d The higher resolution of Vision Pro\u2019s displays and the ability for the widgets to stay anchored or pinned on a wall without jittering or moving made them look very convincing as real objects. The only thing that broke the illusion was almost walking into walls trying to look more closely at the widgets.<\/p>\n

I also tried out the new spatial browsing in Safari. When toggled on, it turns the browser window into a Reader-ish mode view that removes all of a website\u2019s design and only shows the text and the media. As I scrolled down a page, 2D photos would convert into 3D ones with depth\u2014Apple calls these \u201cspatial scenes.\u201d And man, do they look good. The depth isn\u2019t like some cheapo 3D movie conversion. They look like they\u2019re shot with expensive 3D cameras, and unlike most 3D content that has a certain sweet spot for feeling the depth, you can actually view them from different angles. It\u2019s really neat.<\/p>\n

Before I took the Vision Pro off my head, I was teleported to the shore and taken ski gliding via 360-degree videos. Apple says visionOS 26 can play native 180-degree and 360-degree videos from Insta360, GoPro, and Canon cameras. There\u2019s no need to convert the video files into a compatible format for Vision Pro\u2014they just work out of the box. While not as professional as Apple\u2019s own \u201cImmersive Video\u201d content, this should at least get the ball rolling on expanding user-created content. It\u2019s a baby step, but a necessary one considering one of the biggest roadblocks to the Vision Pro, besides the large price tag, is having enough spatial\/immersive content for users to consume.<\/p>\n

Apple didn\u2019t have a demo for using PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers to play games in Vision Pro, but I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll get to try that out at some point. I have the controllers at home, so whenever that\u2019s ready to go, I\u2019ll give it a whirl.<\/p>\n

I left my visionOS 26 demo impressed at the progress Apple\u2019s making. Spatial computing is starting to take a more solid shape. I just wish Apple would drop the price on Vision Pro or hurry up and release a cheaper version so more people could try out this cutting-edge tech. I always feel like nobody believes me when I tell them how awesome Vision Pro and visionOS are on a technological level. They just look at the price and stop listening, which is a real shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the average person, $3,500 is still too much money for Apple Vision Pro. The price is even…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3162],"tags":[1662,53,16,15,3243,41967,72799,3244,12685],"class_list":{"0":"post-176166","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-apple","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-vision-pro","14":"tag-visionos","15":"tag-vr","16":"tag-wwdc-2025"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114665786062722139","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}