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As developers working with Apple products and software, watching WWDC last week was an absolute joy. We feel excitingly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of releases and updates, and we can’t wait to start playing around with all of the new stuff.

We just wanted to take a moment to write a sincere thank you note to the people behind it all. The Vision Pro feels like the centerpiece, so we’ll start there. It’s an incredible achievement.

Thank you to the designers - the industrial design studio, the prototyping groups, and the UX teams. You’ve successfully envisioned, argued for, and defended such an amazing level of quality against the pressure of budgets, timelines, and technology constraints. This is not a Frankenstein's monster of competing priorities and ideas - from the external curves to the concepts of Windows, Volumes, and Spaces, you can sense the collective effort of a large group of people pushing in exactly the same direction.

Thank you to the hardware and camera engineering teams. The R1 chip (and array of associated sensors) appears to be a complete marvel. An attention-based input mechanism with some reasonable precision is 100% a new mass-market interface.

In addition, thank you to the universities and academic departments who fostered so much of this research and trained so many of the people who ended up directly involved. Thank you to the visionary companies who created (and are still pioneering) predecessors to the Vision Pro. Your influence is undeniably to be found in this device’s DNA.

Thank you to those in charge of procuring hardware components from suppliers around the world, and of course to the people working at the suppliers themselves. Some of these components are so new and novel. The effort to stitch them all together must be one of the great supply-chain / global collaboration stories of our time. It would have been a monstrous undertaking in any four year period, but doing it over these past four years - incredible.

In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine the Vision Pro getting announced at anything other than WWDC. It’s surrounded by an ecosystem of supportive software releases that are equally deserving of kudos.

Thank you to the camera software and computer vision teams. People are reporting that the pass-through video input and the blending/occlusion between elements in the display are shockingly good. A special shout-out to the group behind the original ARKit release - even if ‘hit’ ARKit apps haven’t materialized for the iPhone, you’ve seeded an ecosystem of developers who are fully ready to build in this new medium.

From us at Polycam, thank you in particular to the teams working on the 3D-capture-related APIs: Object Capture, RoomPlan, and the depth data provided by the LiDAR sensor. This release truly feels like a set of gifts. Thank you as well to Orlando, our developer advocate, and for the teams facilitating communication between those designing Apple’s APIs and those building with them. The WWDC talks and documentation are an incredible resource.

Thank you to everyone else at Apple who managed to work so long on this project with such a high degree of secrecy. It must be difficult and lonely at times, and it has been fun watching so many of you publicly voice your involvement over the past week.

And thank you finally to the leadership at Apple, for fostering and supporting such a novel hardware project. The Reality Pro feels hugely validating for us folks working in creative technology. We all have such big dreams for the future, though in reality, our ability to produce these dreams is dependent on an ecosystem and community of shared tools. And this looks like a really, really great tool.

Sincerely,

People of Polycam