What An Apple Vision Pro Developer Learned Hiking 70 Miles Outdoors In Headset

Last week I spoke by phone and then transferred the call to headset where I went face to face with the developer of CubicLayer.

Contacting me initially via Bluesky, and asking to be identified by his first name Sean, the developer lists themselves as Industrial Volumetrics on the Apple App Store. In headset, the dev showed me inside the file system on his Mac where I watched intriguing videos, including one showing a virtual fishing pole near the physical ocean, another with a wrist-based virtual compass, and a time lapse of a hike up a mountain wearing the Vision Pro.

I also showed the developer my own videos captured in Central Park testing out CubicLayer. I had tried it out over the previous weekend starting on a park bench and quickly found myself testing the resilience of Apple’s environmental sensing by walking around the park. I uttered a wow when the headset properly occluded a tree in my near field in front of a voxel creation by the bench farther away.

Pinching in the open air creates voxels and I quickly sketched my name behind a tree in public: “Ian was here.”

As my testing progressed, I found myself baffled by certain design choices while simultaneously impressed by the presentation of the underlying spatial scanning data gathered by the headset. I found myself continuing to use the app after I got home. The developer took notes of my criticism during our discussion and we talked about the value of potential features for the future, like Shareplay.

Multitasking Support In visionOS Is More Than Recommended And Less Than Required

Despite this app being bare bones, CubicLayer is already more useful and compelling than the vast majority of apps available on the Apple store, simply by fact of it being usable as a flat panel, a volume, and a fully immersive app. If you want to understand how visionOS intends to integrate into your life more deeply than iOS, start paying attention to the idea that you can have an unlimited number volumes and panels wherever you want, but you can only actually visit one virtual world at a time.

The panel interface is just the main menu, but at any time you can go into fully immersive mode and take away the distractions to build into boundless space. It is my sincere belief that apps lacking all or most of these modes will be crowded out on visionOS by those that do.

CubicLayer bears some similarity to Figmin XR, for example, except that’s a bit of an insult to how polished and powerful Figmin is as a toolset. There’s a voxel editor inside both Figmin and CubicLayer, but CubicLayer supports the visionOS volume mode as an option when Figmin does not. That means, in a very fundamental way, you don’t have to go “inside” CubicLayer to make things in the same way Figmin requires. You can make something with voxels while watching a movie or playing a flat game using CubicLayer as a volume no matter if you’re in full VR or looking at your physical environment in passthrough.

Most notably, CubicLayer includes a mode which draws from the GPS of a paired iPhone to anchor virtual creations on a specific spot in the physical world. The app currently claims to gather no personal information whatsoever, but creating a personal voxel layer mapped on top of physical locations all around the world seems technically feasible here with a bit more progress. What happens when people can share maps of their creations with others? Imagine an app like Waze, which helps drivers avoid speeding tickets on the highway, but with invisible-to-the-naked-eye voxel signposts everywhere sketched by hand.

Next Steps In Apple Vision

So what exactly did this developer learn from hiking more than 70 miles in Apple Vision Pro?

First, the dev now understands how Vision Pro’s spatial mapping works at an intuitive level few other people understand by watching Apple’s APIs hand off the data between systems in front of his eyes. Now, his app is helping other people gain this understanding, too. I learned a lot about Apple Vision Pro just by looking at his videos and using this app.

The dev also wanted optical see-through the entire time they were hiking, which is the display technology being pursued in the Orion prototype at Meta. It’s a common desire among consumers and Mark Zuckerberg himself spent many billions of dollars trying to develop that idea. The problem is that for use cases like building a full-size castle made of voxels, no known technology can believably visualize that entire object for you anywhere you are using mixed reality, except for a wide field of view VR headset with passthrough AR like the Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3.

You can find CubicLayer on the Apple App Store.