Okay, Apple Vision Pro's ‘Spatial Personas' Don't Look Like Trash Anymore

Gizmodo

a day ago

It's still too expensive to buy a headset to make one, though.
For the average person, $3,500 is still too much money for Apple Vision Pro. The price is even more exorbitant when you compare it to a $300 Quest 3S or $500 Quest 3 headset with similar VR and XR capabilities, though the visual fidelity and responsiveness are not on the same level. At WWDC 2025, Apple announced visionOS 26 with a slew of new features, including 'spatial Personas,' 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 'wow,' 'whoa,' and 'holy sh*t' my entire demo time), it still costs you three-and-a-half grand to experience them.
When Apple Vision Pro launched last year and then added spatial Personas—a 3D-generated avatar of yourself that can be used during FaceTime or in a virtual meeting—everybody laughed at them. Literally pointed and (in Nelson Muntz's voice) Ha-Ha-ed at how comically bad they could look. Many people's Personas had holes in the back of people's 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's what my Persona looked like at the time:
I'm 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's what my new spatial Persona looks like in visionOS 26:
There are still some imperfections (like the crookedness of my striped shirt), but my face—my god—it's 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're paying $3,500 for Vision Pro, your virtual self damn well better look more realistic than a console from almost 20 years ago!
Apple's not saying what it did specifically to improve the quality of Personas (perhaps using more polygons?), but here's what the press release says: 'Taking 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.'
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—clocks, 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's Mount Fuji that I could look 'into.' The higher resolution of Vision Pro's 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.
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's design and only shows the text and the media. As I scrolled down a page, 2D photos would convert into 3D ones with depth—Apple calls these 'spatial scenes.' And man, do they look good. The depth isn't like some cheapo 3D movie conversion. They look like they're 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's really neat.
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's no need to convert the video files into a compatible format for Vision Pro—they just work out of the box. While not as professional as Apple's own 'Immersive Video' content, this should at least get the ball rolling on expanding user-created content. It's 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.
Apple didn't have a demo for using PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers to play games in Vision Pro, but I'm sure I'll get to try that out at some point. I have the controllers at home, so whenever that's ready to go, I'll give it a whirl.
I left my visionOS 26 demo impressed at the progress Apple's 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 on a technological level. They just look at the price and stop listening, which is a real shame.