Step Into Newsletter – September 19, 2025

visionOS 26 is finally here!

I have something special for you to celebrate the release of visionOS 26. I’ve curated a list of twenty-six of my favorite features and APIs. This is not an exhaustive list, just some things I’ve been using throughout the summer. Everyone I’ve heard from has learned something new from this list. I’d appreciate if you could share it on social media and help make sure every visionOS developer sees it.

This week on Step Into Vision

We’ve got some new example code and a couple of labs for you to check out.

How to open a unique window. Using Window (instead of WindowGroup) to set up a unique window that will never have copies or instances.

Spatial SwiftUI: onWorldRecenter. We can use this modifier to execute code after the user has re-centered their view. This seems particularly useful in light of the new Unified Coordinate Conversion APIs.

Spatial SwiftUI: glassBackgroundEffect. Sure, we all know how to use glassBackgroundEffect to add glass to a SwiftUI view. But did you know there are other effects, crop shapes, and a powerful implicit display mode? We dive deeper with these labs.

Lab 082 – Using implicit glassBackgroundEffect with depth. A child view using implicit glassBackgroundEffect will render glass under two conditions. When no ancestor views rendering glassBackgroundEffect and when the child view is offset on the z-axis.

Lab 083 – Feathered Glass Title Card. A mock up of a title card for the Shared Visions Project.

Shared Visions

Speaking of Shared Visions, sign-ups are still open for this community project. We’ve had nearly 60 people sign up. If you’d like to contribute your skills and perspective then please join us

Learn more: Shared Visions: a community project

Sign up to participate in the Shared Visions Project

From the Community

Paolo Villanueva is looking for testing and feedback on the latest version of Jumpfinity.

Mathew Spendlove wrote an article to document USD environments in Safari. Check it out and subscribe for future posts. Apple’s new custom environment walkthrough. You may remember Mathew from Campfire Space.

Shader Graph Tutorial: Feathered Edges by Le-Roy Karunaratne. Learn how to created feathered edges around a model by using view direction, normals, dot product, and power. This video takes us through each node on the graph and explains what they contribute to the material. We would like to thank Le-Roy for creating this tutorial for the visionOS community.

Video: IT’S OFFICIAL VisionOS 26 Public Release Is Here from A Vision Experiment on YouTube.

visionOS Review: visionOS 26: The MacStories Review – MacStories. The definitive review of visionOS 26.

Jingle Chen is building a Web App and an Apple Vision Pro App at the same time in the same code base using React and WebSpatial. This will be an interesting project to watch.

New and Updated Apps

Our community has been busy all summer updating and developing new apps. Here are a few highlights.

Imagipets has a ton of new stuff including talking dragons! Check out the trailer to get a glimpse of the app using the new AI and Foundation Model features.

LALO Immersive has new tracks, an updated UI, and takes advantage of the new immersive media features in visionOS 26.

Gravitas Dark Matter is finally out! This is one of the more impressive things we’ve seen on Apple Vision Pro. Add this to your rotation.

Campfire Space has been updated with new volumetric features.

TGV INOUI Experience shows off the future of high speed rail in France. Bonus: this app features some of the most beautiful widgets on the platform.

ExtCalc is a scientific calculator that shows your whole formula in a colorised text view.

From me: Project Graveyard got a complete rewrite. See the latest devlog for a breakdown. I enjoyed comparing two versions of my app. It was a great way to put the progress in perspective. I’d like you to consider doing something like this with your apps. Install an old version and take a tour. Then install the latest version and see how far you’ve come.

The Green Spurt is a collaborative immersive escape room game for Apple Vision Pro. Read all about it: The Green Spurt: Our Spatial Computing Lab Experiment. This was created by Roxana Monica Nagy and Cristian Díaz, who are the hosts of our new Wednesday Edition of Office Hours.

All of the apps listed above were created by members of our community. If you want to meet developers like them, then you need to check out Office Hours. We meet twice per week and hope to add one more time slot by the end of the year.

Happy Friday

Joseph