Apple is making Vision Pro more social by introducing spatial avatars, which break these avatars out of their limited viewport and place them next to you in virtual space. The goal is to make collaborating and hanging out in Vision Pro feel more natural – you can work on a presentation together, watch a movie or play a game via SharePlay as if your friends are right next to you. The feature supports up to five participants and will be available today to anyone with a Vision Pro running visionOS 1.1 or higher.
Meta similarly addresses virtual collaboration as Horizon Workrooms, but Apple’s implementation reminds me more of Microsoft Mesh, which lets me use HoloLens 2 to interact with virtual partners in AR. Like Vision Pro itself, Spatial Personas appears to be a bit more polished than Microsoft 2021-era technology. You can enable or disable them at will through FaceTime calls, and Apple says everyone can adjust the content to their liking without affecting how their virtual companions view it.
While I found Apple’s characters a bit creepy and robotic in my Vision Pro review, the company has been steadily improving them to better capture different facial expressions and hairstyles. The characters are a subpar substitute for actually seeing their friends’ faces when they’re stuck in a FaceTime window. But they might be more useful if they make it appear that your distant friend is actually sitting next to you.
