Joseph Simpson Steps Into Apple Vision Pro Development

Joseph Simpson’s Project Graveyard is one of my favorite apps on Apple Vision Pro for its simple humor:

“Hopes and dreams have to go somewhere,” the App Store description states. “Project Graveyard is a tiny place where you can bury and remember your dead projects. Create gravestones for all your favorite projects and celebrate them forever.”

Now on version 3.0, the volumetric app shares space with other apps running on VisionOS as Simpson works to fully embrace Apple’s operating system. The project helps Simpson with his work at Step Into Vision, a site with guides and sample code that can help out other developers. He’s also working with a community of Vision Pro developers and enthusiasts on a project called Shared Visions aiming to highlight the leap of faith many took in embracing Apple’s high end augmented virtuality headset that doubles as a spatial computer.

“If all VR is gaming, that’s great, but that’s not why I’m here,” Simpson says during the Good VR podcast. “To me, gaming in VR is an additive thing. I use my Mac all day at work. I don’t really play games on my Mac. I have no interest in doing so. I create stuff on my Mac, that’s what it’s for. If I can’t create stuff on this headset, then I don’t want this headset. And fortunately, the only thing that kept the Quest in rotation for me was WebXR so I could have some creativity outlets for it. If all you can do with it is play Beat Saber, I’m sure there are plenty of people to buy that, but it’s not an interesting device.”

We cover Simpson’s long path into VR from returning the original Nintendo VirtualBoy and exchanging it for Game Boy games to exploratory Quest development, then WebXR development, and now Vision Pro development.

“Shared Visions is a community project that I kickstarted last fall. So I kind of announced it around the anniversary of Step Into Vision as kind of a one more thing. Let’s build something together,” Simpson said during the podcast. “So at its core, it is an immersive documentary about the Apple Vision Pro community. So developers, designers, enthusiasts, filmmakers, anybody who’s just using the headset and getting a lot of value out of it. And we are, …using Apple vision pro technology to make it. It’s a visual app that’s running a reality kit scene that’s running a sophisticated timeline to show multiple kinds of media rather than just — it’s not a video file that you go and play and watch. The timeline itself is going to be made of 3D assets and animations and particle systems and of short video clips that we will animate and position around the user as makes sense based on the story that we’re telling. So it is a 3D project with a bunch of video assets rather than a 3D video project, if that makes sense.”

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