A Look Inside the Design of Vision Pro's Environments
The design of Apple Vision Pro’s immersive environments was rooted in rapid prototyping and close collaboration between designers, engineers, and creative talent. The team focused on balancing technical constraints with user emotion to evoke a sense of "presence" and comfort in each virtual space.
- To create Earth-based environments like Yosemite, design teams capture locations using 360-degree panoramic photography, LiDAR scans for 3D geometry, and high-resolution texture capture of elements like rock faces and tree bark. - The team makes deliberate "editorial enhancements" to the environments; for instance, a road visible at the actual Mount Hood location was digitally removed to create a more pristine, pre-industrial scene. - Sound design is critical to realism, with custom acoustic meshes that model how sound behaves in each location, such as the faint echoes off Yosemite's granite walls. - The Jupiter environment was designed and built by artists and designers working collaboratively *inside* Apple Vision Pro, as traditional 2D monitors could not adequately convey the sense of scale required. - For the scientifically plausible Jupiter environment, Apple's team collaborated with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to theorize the moon Amalthea's terrain, which is thought to be rocks held together by ice. - The Jupiter environment is the first to allow for real-time interactivity, letting users change the time of day and observe how shadows migrate across craters as Jupiter's storms and neighboring moons move in the sky. - The project was in development for many years without a set deadline, led by Alan Dye, VP of Human Interface Design, and Richard Howarth, VP of Industrial Design, who emphasized a symbiotic hardware and software development process from the start. - The immersive experiences are powered by a dual-chip system, with the R1 chip specifically handling the streaming of images to the displays every 12 milliseconds to minimize latency.
