visionOS 2 Officially Announced For Apple Vision Pro

Apple officially announced visionOS 2, coming “this fall”.

The second major version of Apple Vision Pro’s operating system was unveiled at the company’s annual WWDC conference today. visionOS 2 will introduce new features and multiple improvements across the operating system.

visionOS 2 will add two system hand gestures. Opening your palm and pinching your index finger to your thumb (the same menu gesture as on Meta Quest headsets) will bring up the app launcher. And facing your palm down again will reveal a new hand-locked information bar with the time, volume, battery percentage, and connectivity status. Pinching it will open Control Center.

The update will also allow you to rearrange apps on your home screen, which is currently forced to alphabetical sorting with no customization.

visionOS 2 will turn regular photos into Spatial Photos, making them 3D using “advanced machine learning”.

The Mac Virtual Display feature is set to get major improvements, expanding the display into a virtual ultrawide equivalent to two 4K monitors together. Apple says this is powered by eye-tracked dynamic foveation.

Safari is getting support for playing fullscreen videos on a gigantic virtual screen in a virtual environment, including YouTube and Netflix.

A new virtual environment will be available, called Bora Bora.

Vision Pro will also become an AirPlay target, allowing you to easily cast media from other Apple devices such as your iPhone.

Your physical Magic Keyboard will show in fully immersive environments, called Keyboard Breakthrough, and physical mice are now supported.

Guest Mode is also getting a significant upgrade. visionOS 2 will allow you to add Guest Users and save their hand and eye setup for up to 30 days.

Travel Mode, currently designed for airplanes, is getting support for trains.

And as was announced in May, visionOS 2 will add a Live Captions option which will apply to live conversations via microphone input as well as audio from any app, including on FaceTime calls.

Apple is also introducing new APIs for developers to expand the kind of visionOS apps they can build.

Apple says new Volumetric APIs will allow “the most advanced apps” to run side-by-side, which may hint at enhanced capabilities for 3D apps in the Shared Space.

HealthKit is also coming to visionOS, enabling health and fitness apps to store and read data to and from your Apple Health profile.

Apple is also making improvements to scene understanding, including adding object tracking and allowing anchoring objects to real surfaces.

A new TabletopKit will make it easier for developers to “quickly build shared and collaborative app experiences centered around a table, like board games or a manufacturing workstation”.

New Enterprise APIs for non-public internal apps are coming too, including raw passthrough camera access.

Apple also announced that Vision Pro is coming to 8 new countries outside the US soon.

Apple Vision Pro Arrives Soon In 8 Countries Outside The US

Apple Vision Pro will soon launch in the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, Singapore and China.