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Step Into Newsletter – October 24, 2025

Joseph Simpson Updated on

Did anything interesting happen this week?

This week on Step Into Vision

For obvious reasons, we may have been a little distracted this week.

RealityKit Basics: Perform Entity Actions. – RealityKit simplifies many common actions like spin, orbit, playing audio, etc.

Model3D: Getting Started. – We’re starting a new series on Model3D. This one covers loading models from bundles and URLs, as well as showing progress views and errors.

Lab 092 – Manipulation from Input Target. This lab documents a simple utility that we use to add Manipulation Component to entities that are already set up for input.

Lab 091 – Light the Beacon. -This was just a bit of fun while waiting for the Apple Vision Pro M5 to arrive.

Please support our work on Ko-Fi!

Immersive Web Environments

Adding Immersive Environments to a Web Page. Using USDZ files to create immersive backgrounds for web pages. Watch the video on YouTube.

A few scenes that are worth checking out

From the Community

New in the Resource Library: Open Game Art.

Learn: Exploring the Different Ways to Load 3D Models in visionOS by Anas Belkhadir

Play: Spatial Rifts by Brian Corrieri. This looks like a lot of fun! Now I just need to get some with headsets to meet up and play this.

Cognitive 3D launched the SDK for spatial insights and analytics.

Gregory Wieber published Making Ice Moon for Apple Vision Pro (Ep 5).

Matt Pfeiffer shared a demo of using the new Logitech Muse.

Apple held an event called Create immersive media experiences for visionOS this week. I saw many friends and colleagues make their way there. Fortunately all the videos are available if you didn’t get to attend or watch during the week.

Apple Vision Pro M5

Apple Released three M5 devices this week. Many of us were waiting for the M5 upgrade to see what progress has been made. I received mine late Wednesday and I’ve only had a couple of hours to use it. I agree with many others that the new Dual Knit Band does a lot to improve the ergonomics. The M5 also allows Apple Vision Pro to run at a higher frame rate, which is noticeable in some situations. This sentence from the press release stood out to me. (emphasis mine)

Vision Pro can also increase the refresh rate up to 120Hz for reduced motion blur when users look at their physical surroundings…

In a room with lots of bright light, this reduced motion blur is noticeable but not solved. In dim rooms however, this improvement seems to disappear.

Other than that, visionOS feels faster than ever. I installed my entire library of apps (around 130 GB from the App Store) and set things up. It took about 45 minutes to get everything configured the way I like, but I haven’t organized my apps or added widgets yet. I’m going to keep my M2 headset for development and testing. I’ll mainly use the new one as my primary XR workstation. I’ll do some testing and development with it, but I’m going to make sure all projects work well on the M2 first.

The community has been busy checking out the new Apple Vision Pro. This is just a tiny slice of the content I saw published this week.

Ivan Campos did some shader graph stress testing comparing the two headsets.

Tim Mitra recorded an unboxing video.

Is it WORTH UPGRADING? Apple Vision Pro M5 HANDS ON by Tyronne Leon-Fernandez.

Phil Traut created this incredible comparison video. He also published an unboxing video and a review video.

Justin Ryan published an unboxing video and some thoughts on YouTube.

Curious about the new Dual Knit Band? Ian Hamilton wrote some initial impressions after a couple of days of use.

David Heaney covered the launch of this new headset in this article.

Join us later today at Office Hours. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of to say about the new Apple Vision Pro.

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