Personas and SharePlay
Persona Improvements
I’m not sure that there’s a visionOS feature that’s come as far in the platform’s short history as personas.4 What started as a noble first attempt to climb out of the depths of the uncanny valley has turned into an incredibly impressive representation of human appearance, expression, and presence that I continue to be blown away by.
Apple’s approach to personas has been bold from the start. They’re meant to be realistic avatars that accurately portray the real-world looks and facial expressions of the user. The company could have gone with something more simple like Memoji or even started with facial scans and layered on a bunch of customization options, but that’s not what they did. The Vision Pro takes a few scans of your face at different angles and then, within a minute, generates an entire 3D representation of your likeness to use in video calls and remote spatial experiences. The audacity of such a tactic with zero backup plan is amazing.
And yet, the visionOS team has proven that they are up to the task. Personas have consistently improved, adding detail and depth with each new iteration, and with visionOS 26, spatial persons are officially exiting beta. Apple thinks these they’re ready for primetime, and I can’t help but agree.
When describing these improved personas, the company cites improvements to sharpness, complexion, hair, and eyelashes, and all of those changes are real and impactful – especially sharpness, which helps personas feel more grounded and less otherworldly. But for me, the biggest enhancement to personas this year is the addition of side profiles. Before, the range of movement for personas was quite limited, mostly to a straight-on view. Now, when you turn your head, your persona can mimic that movement while staying in focus, and the side view still looks remarkably realistic.
The first time I set up my new persona,5 I was struck by the portrayal of the side of my head. I literally said out loud, “Those are my ears!” with an excitement like I’d never seen them before. The added detail and range of motion make personas feel much more natural and, well, alive.
The benefit of personas over any other type of digital avatar is that they have the ability to give the impression of presence in a way that no other type of likeness can. Because a person’s persona looks just like them, when you see them, it feels like you’re actually seeing them. Combine that representation with the way visionOS places personas in space for shared experiences, and you’ve got the best method for getting together remotely with friends and family that I’ve ever seen. If you’re looking to spend quality time with people you care about over a long distance by playing, watching, and just chatting together, you’d be hard pressed to find a better solution than what personas offer.
Personas have been adept at mimicking eye and mouth movements from the start, and now, their appearances have caught up with their expressive capabilities. When you put it all together, personas make for incredibly life-like and compelling digital avatars. I’m no longer embarrassed to use mine in video calls with people who aren’t also Vision Pro users. I genuinely like the way my persona represents me in the digital world, and I still find it hard to believe that we’re already to this point so early in the Vision Pro’s development. It was a really hard problem to solve, but the team did it, and they ought to be extremely proud of themselves for what they’ve accomplished with personas.
Shared In-Person Experiences
From the start, visionOS has included elements of real-time collaboration and sharing, which makes sense because they are areas where spatial computing can make a huge difference in how we work and interact with others. But up to this point, those features have been focused on remote sharing and collaboration based on the assumption that Vision Pro users are in separate locations and connecting via FaceTime. visionOS 26 removes that assumption and brings in-person shared experiences to the platform for the first time.
Vision Pro users can now watch videos, view presentations, collaborate on projects, explore 3D objects, and more together in the same space. Windows, objects, and even environments appear in the same place for all users involved, allowing them to interact with the objects and each other as if the items are physically in the room with them, and media stays perfectly in sync between devices. Remote users can get in on the action via FaceTime, too, and see each user in the shared experience as well as the content being viewed.
If all of this sounds a lot like SharePlay, that’s because it is. In fact, in-person shared experiences are based on SharePlay technology, so any app that’s already implemented remote sharing gets in-person sharing for free. Apple is also providing developers with APIs to intelligently place windows and objects based on users’ positions and to display personas for remote participants in locations that make sense given the participants involved and what’s being shared.
To make it easy to kick off these shared experiences, Apple has added a Share menu accessible via a new button next to the window bar in supported apps. This menu lists nearby Vision Pro users you can share content with and includes an option to share a window via FaceTime instead. The new Window Sharing toggle in Control Center allows you to choose whether you’d like to be listed as an available participant in the Share menu on nearby users’ Vision Pros. The Share menu’s ‘Find More’ option also gives users the ability to start a shared experience via a private code instead of broadcasting their availability publicly.
It’s interesting that these in-person features are coming to visionOS now. The fact that they didn’t ship in visionOS 1 or 2 could be due to the fact that other areas of development simply took priority, or it could be an indication that the platform needed time to become ubiquitous enough for these features to even be necessary. Vision Pro is still a niche product, so the scenarios in which multiple people who have one would find themselves in the same room aren’t that common. I don’t personally know anyone in my area who owns a Vision Pro, so I’ve not yet even had a chance to try these experiences myself, which I think is indicative of where this feature stands for everyday users. At the same time, for companies and friend groups who are invested in Vision Pro and excited about its potential for enhancing in-person experiences, these capabilities likely feel right on time.
One of the most common criticisms of the Vision Pro is that it can be isolating. While Apple has taken measures to keep users connected to the world around them while they’re wearing the device, many of its best experiences like watching films on a huge screen have been limited to individual and remote sessions. Now, people in the same room can enjoy these experiences together, not just in real time but while actually looking at the same content in the same location. There’s something to be said for our innate desire to share experiences with the people around us – not just seeing the same thing but looking at it together, side by side, with our attention pointed in the same direction. It might seem arbitrary, but that shared focus serves as a baseline for human connection, and visionOS can now facilitate that in whole new ways.
Right now, the Vision Pro user base is small enough that shared in-person experiences won’t be daily occurrences (or possibly even accessible at all) for many users. But as the hardware gets more diversified, affordable, and appealing to a wider audience of users who aren’t early adopters, the technology will already be prepared to make movies nights, planning sessions, and plenty of other shared experiences even better with the unique capabilities of spatial computing. Like so many other features in this release, shared in-person sessions have been thoroughly considered to make the user experience as simple and enriching as possible and to set the stage for a visionOS-powered future.
