Shared Visions Project Update for March

We’ve made a lot of progress on the Shared Visions Project. Our core group of contributors has been busy working on all aspects of the app. If you’ve wanted to get involved but haven’t yet, now is your time. This project is made up of half a dozen Herculean tasks, so we could use as much help as possible.

Updates

Story: We’ve been refining the story and structure of the doc. We came up with a list of interview questions that we’re going to ask all participants. We’re also going to use these same questions to guide the story arc of the combined documentary.

The overall structure is something like this.

• Short introduction: who are you?
• Past: what have you been doing?
• Focusing questions: what brought you to a Apple Vision Pro?
• Experience: the core of our story focuses on what people are building “now”. For our purposes “now” describes the last two years since Apple Vision Pro launched.
• Future: a few speculative questions about the future.
• We leave things off with a few questions about community. We want to leave on a high note, expressing gratitude to one another.

We still have a little bit of refinement to do on the questions, but you can preview them here.

Design & UX: Our story workshops led into UX workshops. We had several great sessions discussing visual themes and concepts for the app. A small group of design and UX professional has taken these ideas and has been hard at work on storyboards. We’ll have some updates from them soon.

App Dev: We carved up the development of the project into a few smaller areas. A handful of core members volunteered to lead these efforts.

1. Front-end development. Building the part of the app that people see and interact with. Our windows, views, immersive spaces, etc.
2. Timeline development. Building a custom data driven timeline system that combines video, audio, 3D assets, images, and animations into and executable flow. We decided to break this timeline into small discrete segments. We’ll most likely use individual questions to define these segments, pulling in answers from across the interview submissions.
3. Back-end development. Building the infrastructure that our app needs to serve content. In particular, our library of longer videos needs a home. We have had multiple generous offers from the community for hosting and streaming tech.
4. Apple hosted background assets. We’re investigating the use of this technology from Apple to host all of the assets for the core documentary experience.

The app team also went on a bit of a side quest. We started working on a tool to collect assets from our community. This web app will facilitate the collection of all of large video files and assets for the project, and provide one place where the editing team can download everything. This tool will also include a system for declaring interview availability time slots. Our Project Management team will use this to match participants with interviewers. This is still in a rough draft stage, but we hope to have it usable soon.

Policy: it may not be the most exciting part of the project, but we’ve made a lot of progress on licensing agreements.

• Contributor agreement: covers likeness and usage and interview content.
• Supplemental Content Agreement: covers additional files participants may donate to the project.

Our participants will license their content under CC-BY 4.0, retaining their rights and ownership while giving us access use these assets for this project.

Publishing: Step Into Vision LLC will act as the publisher and distributor of the final product. We’ve been hard at work setting up a new LLC, getting a DUNS number, and registering this new org in the Apple development ecosystem.

Looking Ahead

We still have more work ahead of us than behind us. As we mentioned at the start of this article, we could use all the help you can provide. If you have already signed up, please get active in the Discord and start attending our weekly meeting. Contact Joseph or Jimmy if you would like an introduction to a core team.

If you’re reading this and haven’t joined the project yet, you can sign up here.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be focusing on several areas.

• Building out the internal tool that facilitates asset collection.
• Building the video production pipeline with the editing team. We have some hardware requirements yet to fulfill, but we hope to have these resolved soon.
• We’re going to start with a round of interviews for our core team. About fifteen people have been consistently active in this project since the beginning. We’re going to prioritize interviewing them before opening submissions to the larger Shared Visions Community.
• Our editing team will use these early interviews to build out their pipeline, tools, and workfow.

We’re doing every thing we can to get this project ready by WWDC 2026. We think it will be amazing and we can’t wait to show the world our amazing community.