Apple provides Spatial Persona avatars in Vision Pro to help you feel less alone

Apple is making Vision Pro a little more social with the introduction of Spatial Personas, which removes these avatars from their limited windows and puts them right next to you in virtual space. The goal is to make collaboration and going out feel more natural in Vision Pro—you can work on presentations together, watch movies through SharePlay, or play games as if your friends were right next to you. The feature works with up to five participants and will be available today to anyone with Vision Pro running visionOS 1.1 or later.

Meta handled virtual collaboration in a similar way with Horizon Workrooms, but Apple’s implementation reminds me more of Microsoft Mesh, which allowed me to interact with virtual companions in AR using HoloLens 2. Like Vision Pro itself, Spatial Personas seems a little more accurate than Microsoft’s 2021 era technology. You can enable or disable them at will from within a FaceTime conversation, and Apple says that everyone will be able to adjust the content as they wish without affecting how their virtual companions will see it.

While I found Apple’s Personas a bit creepy and robotic during my review of the Vision Pro, the company is constantly improving them to better capture different facial expressions and hairstyles. When they stay in a FaceTime window, Personas are a poor substitute for actually seeing your friends’ faces. But they might be more useful if they could make it look like your faraway friends are actually sitting next to you.