Apple announces visionOS, the operating system for its Vision Pro headset

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He's submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Apple has announced visionOS, the operating system that will power its new Vision Pro headset. Apple says it's designed from the ground up for spatial computing.

The company revealed the operating system as part of its many announcements at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2023 event. The operating system is focused on displaying digital elements on top of the real world. Apple's video showed new things like icons and windows floating over real-world spaces.

The primary ways to use the headset are with your eyes, hands, and your voice. The company described how you can look at a search field and just start talking to input text, for example. Or you can pinch your fingers to select something or flick them up to scroll through a window. The Vision Pro can also display your eyes on the outside of the headset — a feature Apple calls "EyeSight."

It seems Apple envisions this in part as a productivity device; in one demo, it showed a person looking at things like a Safari window, Messages, and Apple Music window all hovering over a table in the real world. Apple also showed a keyboard hovering in midair, too. And the Vision Pro can also connect to your Mac so you can blow up your Mac's screen within your headset.

It will also be a powerful entertainment device, apparently. You can make the screen really big by pinching a corner of a window (Apple demoed this with a clip of Foundation). You can display the screen on other backgrounds, including a cinema-like space or in front of Mt. Hood (Apple's suggestion!), thanks to a feature Apple calls Environments. You’ll also be able to watch 3D movies on the device. And Disney is working on content for the headset, which could be a major way for people to get on board with actually using it to watch shows and movies — Disney Plus will be available on day one, Disney CEO Bob Iger said during the show.

Apple Vision Pro will play games, too, and support game controllers; Apple showed somebody using the device with a PS5 DualSense headset. Over 100 Apple Arcade titles will be available to play on "day one," Apple said during its keynote.

The Vision Pro also has a 3D camera, so you can capture "spatial" photos and video and look at those in the headset. And panorama photos can stretch around your vision while you’re wearing the device. FaceTime is getting some "spatial" improvements, too; as described in Apple's press release, "users wearing Vision Pro during a FaceTime call are reflected as a Persona — a digital representation of themselves created using Apple's most advanced machine learning techniques — which reflects face and hand movements in real time."

visionOS will have a brand-new App Store where people can download Vision Pro apps, and the Vision Pro will be able to run "hundreds of thousands of familiar iPhone and iPad apps," Apple says.

The launch of a new operating system marks a big moment for Apple — and for developers. With Apple releasing this new headset, we’ll almost certainly see a rush of developers making apps that try and take advantage of the new platform in hopes of becoming the next stratospheric hit. Apple has already been particularly interested in augmented reality, but as my colleague Adi Robertson wrote, augmented reality needs an iPhone moment — and Monday could have been it.

That said, other augmented reality platforms haven't yet hit critical mass. And we’ll have to wait to see if Apple's new visionOS operating system can avoid turning into the next watchOS, which has gradually lost some major apps over time, like Microsoft Authenticator, Uber, and Instagram.

Apple is almost certainly hoping its new OS someday becomes an iOS-level juggernaut. Now that the company has finally revealed what the platform is capable of, the race is on for Apple and developers to try and make the next big thing. Though we’ll be waiting a while until we see just how big it might be; Apple says the headset won't be available until early next year.

Update June 5th, 6:37PM ET: Added that the Vision Pro will be able to access "hundreds of thousands" of iPhone and iPad apps.

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