After spending an hour and a half at night with a friend, drawing, playing games, watching movies and looking at models, I realized I forgot to say goodnight to my kid. It was after 10 p.m. In my office, I felt like I was hanging out with someone for ages in all sorts of worlds. I was alone, though. Norman Chan, co-founder of Tested, was miles away in a hotel room. We were just teleporting into each other’s spaces, and for a while it felt like we were really sharing time together.
Apple made a small but very important change to the way its Personas, its word for avatars, look and interact on the Vision Pro headset. Spatial Personas, a feature that’s now available to test in developer beta mode, frees Apple’s ghostly scanned likenesses of friends and colleagues from their windowed confines, allowing them to seem to like they’re floating directly in your space, pointing and even interacting with the things you’re using in mixed reality. It’s a feature Apple promised back at WWDC 2023 when the Vision Pro was announced, and it’s suddenly here, over a month after the Vision Pro launch, two months before Apple is expected to announce even more software updates at WWDC 2024.
I’ve dreamed of mixed reality telepresence before. Demoed it, even. I tried AR glasses experiences with startup company Spatial where I collaborated with virtual avatars floating in the world around me back in early 2020. Microsoft’s Alex Kipman appeared as an avatar in my home office while I wore a HoloLens 2, testing Microsoft Mesh in 2021. Meta’s had virtual spaces and metaverse apps where I’ve tried theater, work and games. And Google showed me light field displays where real people, projected as 3D versions of themselves in front of me, made for realistic telepresence chats in 2022.
Apple’s floating 3D Spatial Personas feel like a blend of all of these, and the way that Apple’s Personas emote and animate are even more compelling when allowed to be active and more present. Spatial Personas activate via a small button toggle on FaceTime calls in Vision Pro that looks like a 3D head emoji. Whoever’s chatting with you just drops in as a head, part of a set of shoulders and floating hands. It’s not a full body and the backs of people’s heads are still empty. It’s like you’re chatting with the half-scanned version of them, like the holograms Ericsson showed CNET’s Katie Collins last month. But it’s compelling, and feels eerily real.
