Matias Gelos
CTO
5 MIN READ
Introduction
Why visionOS 26 matters
With visionOS 26, Apple Vision Pro feels less like a futuristic demo and more like a living workspace. Headliners include spatial widgets you can pin around your room, shared experiences with people standing next to you, native 180°/360°/wide-FOV video, PSVR2 controller support, and enterprise-grade APIs. It’s a big unlock for both usability and app design.
A developer’s lens
From our time building for Vision Pro, the gaps have been onboarding, persistence, and collaboration. This update squarely targets those: spatial widgets persist, controller input reduces first-time friction, and SharePlay for nearby people finally makes co-located experiences turnkey.
Spatial Widgets & Room Persistence
Pin-anywhere widgets that remember your space
Widgets are no longer “a panel.” They’re spatial—pin clocks, calendars, photos, weather, or music controls to your wall or desk and they’ll reappear in the same place every time you put on the headset. Apple’s doing private, on-device room mapping so your layout sticks without leaking your home. For content-heavy workflows, this means your “war room” persists from session to session.
Designing custom widgets with WidgetKit
Developers can ship custom widgets that look like real objects, with depth, materials, and sizes tuned for visibility. Treat placement like interior design: low-friction glanceability, minimal occlusion, and lighting-aware materials. Start with small, high-signal widgets (status, KPIs, hand-off cues). Apple’s WWDC guidance covers visual depth, widget anatomy, and adaptation from iPhone/iPad.
Shared Experiences (Local SharePlay)
Co-watching, co-playing, co-working in the same room
With visionOS 26, multiple Vision Pro users in the same physical space can join one spatial experience—co-watch a 3D film, inspect a model, play a spatial game, or run a workshop together. Remote participants can still join via FaceTime Personas, so hybrid sessions just work. Ideal for design reviews, education, and sales demos.
Building with GroupActivities
Under the hood, this uses SharePlay and spatial anchors. The developer videos walk through state sync, nearby invitations, and how to reconcile each user’s point of view. If you’ve built SharePlay on iOS, the mental model carries over—only now your “shared object” lives in the room.
Immersive Media: 180°, 360°, & Wide FOV
Your old Insta360/GoPro/Canon footage, reborn
With visionOS 26, 180°, 360°, and wide field-of-view content plays natively—including legacy footage shot on popular cameras—so your back catalog becomes watchable the way it was meant to be: immersive and at scale. Think training POVs, travel reels, sports analysis, and classroom media libraries.
App and web playback
Developers can incorporate the new playback capability into apps and websites. This is perfect for media hubs, LMS portals, and branded archives that want “click-to-immerse” instead of flat embeds.
PSVR2 Controller Support
Controller onboarding vs hand-tracking
One major difference vs Meta: Vision Pro launched without controllers. Hand/eye input is magical once you get it, but first-time users can struggle. PSVR2 Sense support gives us a familiar, low-friction onboarding path for demos, trade shows, and training—hand them controllers and they’re productive in seconds.
Precision for games and pro tools
We get 6DoF tracking, finger touch detection, and vibration—great for VR ports and precise tools (sculpting, surgical sims, measuring). Expect a wave of controller-native games and pro creation workflows that weren’t feasible on hand-only input.
2D → 3D Photo Transformation (Spatial Scenes)
Generative depth with lifelike parallax
Spatial Scenes apply a generative AI + computational depth pass to flat photos so users can lean in and see subtle perspective. It’s not photogrammetry, but the effect is surprisingly convincing for memories, catalog images, and learning content.
Spatial Scene API: where it shines
You can render Spatial Scenes in Photos, Spatial Gallery, Safari, or your own app via API. Sweet spots: real estate previews, museum archives, product look-arounds, and edu dioramas. Mind the edges: it won’t invent occluded details perfectly; give users a reset and clarity controls.
SpeechAnalyzer: On-Device Speech-to-Text
Fast, private, multilingual transcription
Apple’s new SpeechAnalyzer + SpeechTranscriber provide modern, on-device speech-to-text with support for multiple locales—fast, offline-friendly, and private (no round-trips to the cloud). Great for captions, notes, voice UIs, and accessibility.
Patterns to ship now
Pair SpeechAnalyzer with gaze/gesture for “talk-and-touch” UX. Auto-caption 180/360 training videos, transcribe meetings in-room, or offer real-time multilingual notes for travelers (and store nothing server-side). Dev articles report Whisper-class accuracy at higher speed in current betas.
Safari for the Spatial Web
Inline 3D with the <model> element
Safari on visionOS 26 supports the <model> HTML element: embed interactive 3D directly in a page with lighting, interactions, and animations. Users can rotate/inspect models without leaving the site—huge for commerce, museums, training, and docs.
Drag-and-drop to space
Users can drag a 3D model from the page and drop it into their room for Quick Look. That’s the moment spatial web clicks—content jumps off the page. Build web catalogs that become room-scale try-ons with one gesture.
Enterprise Upgrades
Team device sharing via iPhone
Organizations can pool headsets and let each user bring their calibration, vision prescription, accessibility, and settings via iPhone. It’s the practical answer to “how do we share one Vision Pro across shifts?” and speeds deployments.
Protected Content API & compliance
Mark content as confidential and the system blocks copying, screenshots, screen sharing, and casual shoulder-surfing. For PHI, PII, and sensitive IP, this API simplifies your compliance story and reduces custom policy code.
Spatial Accessories (Logitech Muse)
Pencil-style precision
Logitech Muse is a spatial stylus built for Vision Pro: draw, measure, and interact with millimeter-level precision—ideal for CAD, industrial design, architecture, and annotation over live scenes.
Creative workflows
Expect hybrid workflows: model in CAD on Mac, sketch in space with Muse, review with local SharePlay, and lock down distribution with Protected Content. The press release explicitly calls out Muse support in visionOS 26.
Conclusion
As of visionOS 26, Vision Pro becomes a place you return to—mapped to your home and office, shared with teammates, and powered by secure, on-device intelligence. Planning your next build? The path is clear: spatial widgets for persistence, controllers for precision, the Spatial Scene API for delightful depth, SpeechAnalyzer for private voice UX, the spatial web for reach, and enterprise APIs for scale. Let’s make something people can live and work in.
Want help scoping or shipping your visionOS 26 app? Let’s chat—Frame Sixty builds production-ready spatial software for startups and enterprises alike.
FAQs
Below you’ll find quick answers to the most common visionOS 26 questions—covering spatial widgets & room persistence, PSVR2 controllers and immersive media (180/360/3D photos), plus enterprise APIs and on-device SpeechAnalyzer. If we didn’t cover yours, drop us a line!
Do I need controllers now, or are hands still supported?
Hands remain first-class. PSVR2 support simply adds precise, familiar input—great for first-time users, games, and pro tooling that benefits from haptics and finger detection.
How private is on-device transcription with SpeechAnalyzer?
Speech runs on-device with system models and multi-language support, minimizing server calls and speeding up results—ideal for captions and notes in sensitive environments.
What’s the best way to do multi-user sessions in the same room?
Use SharePlay with GroupActivities and spatial anchors. visionOS 26 adds turnkey nearby invitations and synchronization patterns for co-located users.
How do we share a single Vision Pro across a team?
VisionOS 26 supports team device sharing: users store calibration, vision prescription, and accessibility settings on their iPhone and load them onto shared headsets.