I want a universal interface.

 I’m also already tired of these Apple sterile nature environments. I want to be me. I want to be my avatar in VRChat, to look down and see my digital clothes. And I want to be able to sit in any of the many rainy night cyberpunk worlds I’ve found that make me happy. I think the way to do this would be for visionOS to allow all your windowed apps to run in the foreground of an immersive app. In any case, custom environments have to come ASAP, for Meta and Apple. Outside of VRChat, I guess I’m imagining a void with some nice colored dots or clouds floating around me, kind of like a stylized “cyberspace,” with any window from any operating system easily resizable and interactable with a mouse and keyboard. As nice as eye tracking can be, it’s just not precise or accurate enough yet for the small scale of text I want to be interacting with, and mouse and keyboard will be most effective until we can make a better BCI.

Window/OS Management

When you have a lot going on, (which college students often do), window management is stressful. Managing real estate is stressful too. This is why I’ve always chased that infinite screen real estate pipe dream. There is friction in switching the inputs between streaming Windows and macOS to visionOS, as my Mac requires the built in keyboard and trackpad and Windows requires a separate bluetooth keyboard and mouse. The best solution would be to allow visionOS to support mice, and then have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected to the headset that transfers it to each stream on a dime. My bluetooth keyboard supports up to 3 connections, but it still takes a second to switch devices, which is not good for fast switching. 

As for window management, I don’t think any of the current paradigms, like docks, mission control, or app switcher are bad. I think they can still be very useful for managing spatial windows. I see how Apple wants to simplify the computing experience, but I think it’s a mistake to remove ways to see every open overlapping app and easily recall recent ones. I think this will change as visionOS gains more power users that come to similar conclusions. My current ideal setup is just adding swipeable spaces support to visonOS’s window management system with a dock and recent apps view, similar to the app switcher in iPadOS or command-tab on macOS. They could build on the current macOS desktops system and you can physically swipe your hand right or left to switch spaces. You should also be able to easily hide all apps except one to temporarily focus on something or just watch a video. The important part is that everything still works without these extra systems. I agree with Apple’s approach to selectively hide more power-user features from iPad users by default. 

With these systems implemented well, I think we could also rebuild the desktop streaming experience, where every app is streamed individually, are treated as native apps by the multitasking managers, and can be easily resized. Because of Apple’s locked-down approach and raw performance requirements, we’re always going to need to stream external computers into the headset. Whether it be Unity development, a preference for the desktop version of Discord, or any app that only exists on desktop operating systems. So why not make them feel as native as possible? 

TLDR To-Do List:

• Better visionOS window management, like mission control and spaces you can swipe between.

• Allow visionOS to run all your windowed apps inside of an immersive app, so I can stream PCVR VRChat as my background.

• Dynamically launchable and resizable individually streamed desktop apps that behave as normal visionOS apps.

• Allow windows to fully receive your window inputs so you can do trackpad/mouse gestures and smooth scrolling for desktop streaming.

• Dynamically launchable and resizable individually streamed desktop apps that behave as normal visionOS apps. for desktop streaming.