VisionOS 26 keeps pushing Apple's newest platform toward the future

Summary

visionOS 26 keeps pushing Apple’s newest platform toward the future My visionOS 26 persona. The side of my head really does look like that! If visionOS and the Vision Pro are all about charting a course to the future of wearable devices in front of our eyes, Apple needs to keep pushing toward that future at every opportunity. Fortunately, visionOS keeps moving forward, with several substantial feature improvements that have rolled out in updates over the past year-plus. With visionOS 26, Apple keeps pushing, as it should. Apple had already taken its most uncanny launch feature (the dead-eyed Personas) and made it shine with a software update; it could have paused there for a while, but instead, visionOS 26 ups the game. Spatial Personas are now the default, and there’s an entirely new Persona engine that makes them look remarkably better. The old Personas looked good straight on, but from a bit of an angle, they looked like a face tacked on to a flat piece of cardboard or something. These new Personas capture more of the side of the head, capture hair and eyelashes better, and do an incredible job of capturing skin details. Unfortunately, while beards look better, they still limit a Persona’s mouth movement. Another drive forward is geographic persistence. In the long run, assuming AR glasses are a thing (which is what we’re all assuming here, because that’s why this whole project exists), you’ll want to be able to place an item somewhere and have it appear there when you come back to it later. In previous versions of visionOS, there was basically no item persistence at all—if you rebooted the Vision Pro, all your windows were closed, and you needed to set them up again. visionOS 26 fixes all of that. Now you can leave items in one place and they’ll appear when you enter that space, even if the Vision Pro has rebooted or shut down in the interim. Windows are always where you left them. It’s great for short-term reusability, and a must if you take the long view. A bi...