I look much more like myself in the visionOS 26 persona.
For several months, my Slack avatar was a screenshot of my incredibly cursed Vision Pro persona. My virtual avatar’s head was cocked back, cackling into the pixelated void, her hair one solid unmoving block. It wasn’t good – but it also wasn’t the end of the world. Everyone else’s Persona looked just as horrible, and honestly, it was funny. So I was skeptical when, at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced that visionOS 26 had improved the system’s floating avatars.
And then I got to make one.
The process to make Personas hasn’t changed, but the end result is vastly improved. (Full disclosure: The video you see above was recorded by Apple and provided to me after my demo.) It doesn’t completely erase the uncanniness – the bottom half of your face is still more expressive than the top, it got my nose a bit weird in certain angles, and some microexpressions feel stiff. But hair looks more like hair now. You can see eyelashes and skin texture. It was even able to capture my nose contour makeup.
Side profiles have also been improved – something I noticed in a FaceTime with our old weekend editor Wes Davis, a fellow Vision Pro owner who also downloaded the visionOS 26 beta. Previously, i …
Read the full story at The Verge.