WHAT if you could redecorate your home instantly? And without paying a penny?
Well, it’s not sci-fi – it’s just months away. This is the hi-tech future that Apple showed me at its California HQ just last month.
Later this year, you’ll be able to add virtual decorations to your real home[/caption]
You can even peer through this window into a vast digital panorama – as if you were looking out through real glass[/caption]
The Sun’s tech editor Sean Keach has been using the Vision Pro headset to explore the virtual world[/caption]
Back in 2024, Apple launched the Vision Pro. It’s a powerful hi-tech headset that lets you see floating apps overlaid on top of the real world.
So if you want to sit back and watch Ted Lasso on a massive 100-inch telly like Apple chief Tim Cook does, you can don the goggles and away you go.
The world isn’t blocked out: you’ll still see your kids playing with Lego on the floor, or your cat demanding its third breakfast.
Now the company is preparing to roll out a major update that not only upgrades the headset…but your home too.
A VISION OF THE FUTURE
Right now, most of the apps that you use on a Vision Pro headset float in the air in front of you. Spooky.
It’s neat if you’re on an airplane, as you can block out your surroundings and find a bit of peace in economy.
But in the real world, you don’t normally have important stuff just hovering mid-air. You wouldn’t typically stick your telly in the middle of the room, or covering a window. It gets in the way.
In the new visionOS 26 update (coming later this year alongside the iOS 26 iPhone upgrade), you’ll be able to stick widgets to the wall.
You could chuck a virtual clock up on the wall (and save money on having a real one).
Or you could drop the Weather app just by the front door, so you know whether you need to grab a coat.
Ditch picture frames and slap the Photos app on the wall for a nice carousel of your favourite snaps.
Or even add Reminders right next to the fridge, so you’ve always got your shopping list in plain sight.
There’s even a very cool (and optional) effect that insets the widget into the wall. So it feels as if it’s built directly into your home.
You can even add beautiful images that sit behind the wall, and then you can lean left and right, or forwards and backwards, to almost peer into a magical world that lives beyond your room.
The Apple Vision Pro headset is a “spatial computer”[/caption]
Of course there’s nothing behind there. Except maybe dust and spiders.
But it allows for something that wouldn’t physically be possible with a normal wall. No amount of money can buy this in the real world. This is redecorating like never before.
“When it’s inset into the wall, it has to just be perfectly aligned with the wall to have that feel satisfying,” said Jeff Norris, senior director at Apple’s Vision products group, speaking to me at Apple Park.
“You have to understand the surfaces in the room.”
EYE TRY
I tried this out in California, and I was shocked by how convincing it was.
It looked like these widgets were right there, as embedded in the wall as a door or window frame.
And as I moved around the room, they’d stay stuck in place. I couldn’t trick it, no matter which way I turned or walked.
This isn’t very easy to achieve, Apple tells me.
You can easily customise the widgets that you’re adding to your wall[/caption]
It works using the Apple Vision Pro smart goggles[/caption]
“It needs to remember the room,” Jeff explained.
And it needs to do that even if the lighting conditions change significantly. Or if things get moved around in the room a little bit.
“We have to be able to do that, and do that for many different rooms.
“Meaning that feature you saw, it’ll work for your home office and your office at work.
“It will remember both of those rooms, and remember what you put in both of those places.
“So that moment you walk into your office at home, we have just a fraction of a second to say: ‘Okay, what room are we in? Let’s remember everything that was in that room, exactly where it was. And while we’re at it, let’s never lose track of where we are in that space’.”
They’re not just stiff images either.
You can walk right up to them and interact with them. Change a photo or tick off a reminder.
Change the colour of a visionOS 26 widget to suit your room[/caption]
And if you don’t like one clock style, you can swap it out for something else.
“It’s amazing that you can have a digital object like a widget that feels like it’s right there in the room with you,” Steve Sinclair, who is in charge of Apple Vision Pro marketing, told me.
“Even though your brain knows it’s not, it feels like it is. And you can interact with it as if it’s there.”
Right now, the only way to view these virtual redecorations is to don the Vision Pro headset.
VISIONOS 26 – WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
Here are some bonus features coming in visionOS 26:
- Look to Scroll
- Redesigned Control Centre
- Ability to unlock iPhone while wearing Apple Vision Pro
- Relaying calls from iPhone
- Folders on Home View
- Improved quality for Personas
Picture Credit: Apple
And that means only you’re seeing them. No one else.
SHRINKING BIG
But you can imagine a future where maybe the Vision Pro has shrunk to the size of glasses, and everyone in your house has a pair.
Apple rival Meta has shown off this kind of futuristic gadget – albeit only as a prototype – in the form of the Orion smart glasses.
The Apple Vision Pro serves up immensely greater visual quality. But it’s a big headset and, ultimately, very expensive at £3,499/$3,499.
Sadly Apple hasn’t confirmed any plans for smaller or cheaper “spatial computing” headsets. And glasses-style mixed-reality specs that don’t cost mega-money are years away.
You can inset widgets into the wall for a very cool effect[/caption]
But this is a glimpse at the future of what homes might become.
You can imagine one day being able to change the colour of your wallpaper or sofa in an instant – and add a nice rug, if you’d like.
But for now, Apple is only adding the ability to add widgets to the walls. Still, it’s a step in that direction.
It’s not a huge stretch to imagine a future where we all don specs that aren’t much bigger than regular glasses.
This would give us all access to a digital world that lives all around us – rather than being squeezed into our eyes through the tiny window of a smartphone screen.
And swiping a new photo onto your wall is a lot easier than hanging a frame. I’m rubbish at DIY, so this can’t come soon enough.
Apps usually float in front of you on the Vision Pro, but widgets can be attached to your wall[/caption]
The Vision Pro headset lets you see virtual objects as if they were in your real physical space[/caption]
