This first half of 2023 in the Apple world ended with the presentation of a project that the brand has been preparing for years. The arrival of the Vision Pro is fruit of years of work and test(and error) in various fields of research and development. What Jobs called “throwing away 1000 NOs until you find the YES”.
Or the Apple world for more than 17 years in Applesfera offers an interesting perspective on context: In 2007, the year the iPhone was released, rumors were already circulating about a next big shift in the one paradigm that hasn’t changed since the arrival of the Macintosh in 1984. work and its use in two dimensions.
In 2007, the launch of the iPhone made shaken everything – including rethinking the way we work with our Macs. It was happening at Apple too, no doubt, maybe even long before that. i like to think that when Jobs came back in the late 90s, he was already asking these questions – In 2023, we answered the one that the industry has been pursuing since the prehistory of computing.
Special computing is the answer
Today, that may still sound like science fiction to us, despite the fact that the Vision Pro has already been officially announced. The paths they open are important, but visionOS seems to me even more decisive, the platform that will evolve with the device and which is at the center of everything.
The exploration to evolve the metaphor of the office began more than 15 years ago, with some crazy (but insufficient) ideas.
Those of you who have been here a long time will surely remember it. The “holy grail” of innovation was called Mac OS 11, although today it may seem strange to us. It’s for the simple reason that “Mac OS X” brought the single most significant OS-level change to Macs in living memory – and it lasts until today. For many – myself included – Mac OS 11 could mean another such radical change, seen at the time.
The exploration of the three-dimensional desktop began more than 15 years ago
In fact, it was rumored that Mac OS X Leopard might have a three-dimensional desktop for the first time, but the company continued to explore the possibilities. Some, Really crazy… but not enough. We were seeing the 3D desktop metaphor known as “Stacks”, but there was still something missing.
In fact, what happened was that left over something: the screen itself. We were so used to browsing it that few were able to anticipate its real need or its evolution. They were looking for the most natural way to scale the virtual office and in reality the most natural thing was to integrate it into reality itself: the answer seems to be the Spatial Computing offered by Apple – and that’s why macOS 11 only lasted a year and not twenty with Mac OS X.
The Incredible “Lost” Video
Three days before the release of the Vision Pro, I personally thought that Apple was going to change the world. Today I’m convinced: the direction and the horizon are clearer than ever and are not the result of chance.
On reddit I found a reference to an incredible video that was posted on YouTube three years ago, and this “lost” on the Internet – going completely unnoticed. It is a prototype virtual reality operating system that speaks many basics of what visionOS is today. The video would have the importance of curiosity without more, were it not for the fact that the person who posted it worked for Apple for five years, from 2013 to 2018.
Meet Matthaeus Krenn, a designer whose job was to create and experiment with user experience prototypes based on new technologies – including virtual reality. He posted the video when he was already out of business, but personally I have no doubt that he was involved in the testing and evolve this virtual office metaphor towards the spatial calculation that we know today.
everything in this video It is supported and explained in detail, including staging. It even starts with a mockup of what appears to be a pair of mixed reality glasses, which looks a lot like what the Vision Pro is today. As soon as you put it on, it starts simulating this “fictional” operating system called VR-OS. .
The video shows what appears to be a prototype very similar to the basics that just reached visionOS
The more than 38 minutes that the video lasts They are divided into several parts: the multiple user login screen, get started with the environment, how to organize your workflow, navigate between applications, work with spaces and 3D models, invite a collaborator, and merge between multiple workspaces.
Video it’s a pure delight to watch and I encourage you to read it in its entirety: it tells us a lot about the questions that were asked before coming to visionOS, and what we will explore in the future – which has finally come true.
In Appleswill | “It will change humanity”: all the experts who have tested the Apple Vision Pro agree that it is the best experience in augmented reality
