Developing For A New Generation Of Glassholes
The Apple Vision Pro and the so called spatial computing revolution is indeed coming, with the arrival of a dev kit for the $3500 AR goggles. Cupertino today released their Xcode 15 beta 2 SDK for registered developers, though unlike some previous AR/VR glasses you don’t get a chance to try the device, only the software. The lack of hardware to test doesn’t mean there is nothing to be learned from this release, as the software will certain reveal many of the capabilities of the Apple Vision Pro.
The AR goggles will run on something called visionOS, which is being described as quite different from previous Apple OSes. Apple is hoping that the long lead time between offering the SDK and the actual release of their AR ski goggles will give developers a chance to design decent software to run on the Vision Pro. To assist in this Apple will be setting up a number of labs for software developers to show off what can be done with the glasses and presumably to collaborate with other devs to ensure that there is a decent ecosystem of software at launch.
The Register was also told that there will soon be tools available to port Unity games and apps to visionOS, though who is going to want to fork over $3500 to game spatially is rather unclear.
