If you’re like most people, you probably don’t appreciate the idea of being trapped in a room with raging bats or furious spiders. I mean, at least if you’re a normal human with a semblance of rational fear threshold. So you’ll probably be enlightened to know that an issue with Apple Vision Pro that you never knew existed is now resolved. That issue allowed people to create websites and inject code that filled your VR experience with bats and spiders.
Hell to the no.
Ryan Pickren is credited with uncovering the wildly odd bug that was covertly inside of visionOS Safari that allowed a handful of bizarre actions to take hold. So say you pop onto a website in Safari while browsing on your over-priced Apple Vision Pro VR headset. Suddenly, bats swarm down all over your space. You think, F this, and close Safari. But the terror, unfortunately, doesn’t end there because the bug allows the flying bats to continue even when you close Safari and the offending website.
The bug is bigger in scope than just the terror it inflicts on one’s perception. Tim Cook was rather diligent in wanting to avoid these exact scenarios where any website or entity could take over someone’s personal VR space. Due to this, Apple’s apps don’t allow “shared space” context. Apps requesting immersive experiences must gain approval which if granted, allows for full space.
But alas, this seemingly failed to cover Safari’s settings.
But, according to Pickren, the VisionOS team overlooked an older web-based 3D model viewing standard – Apple AR Kit Quick Look! Back in 2018, when Apple began exploring AR/VR/XR, they created an HTML-based method for rendering 3D Pixar files on iOS called In-Place USDZ Viewing. By adding the “ar” value to an anchor tag’s “rel” attribute and placing an <img> tag inside the <a> element, any website could tell mobile Safari to treat the link as an in-place 3D model. All users had to do was click the link, and Safari would instruct the Quick Look application to render the file.
And that led us to bat-spider-gate.
Thankfully, these dark days that we never knew existed seem to be over. So in other words, your safe from swarms of bats and spiders entering your spheres of immersion and can once again, safely surf in Apple’s VR world.