Put on Vision Pro and become an "astronaut": Apple reveals the behind-the-scenes development of the "Ganymede" immersive environment

IT House, February 25 — Apple recently launched the immersive environment Amalthea on visionOS 26. On February 21, during an interview with Cool Hunting, the visionOS team first revealed the complex design process from concept to reality for these virtual spaces.

Yuri Imoto from the visionOS product marketing team and Apple human-machine interface designer Matt Dessero stated in the interview that the team always centered “naturalness” as the core foundation during the early design stages.

Dessero explained that designers repeatedly consider what emotions these environments might evoke in users, such as whether they can bring a sense of calm, enhance focus, or stimulate curiosity about exploring the unknown. Based on these emotional considerations, the team ultimately chose Amalthea, one of Jupiter’s many moons, as the visual focus.

When creating realistic scenes of Earth locations like Mount Hood and Yosemite, the design team conducted all-weather on-site image collection. They used LiDAR scanning and high-precision material capture technology to build a unified 3D geometric mesh. To make the environment “come alive,” the team also customized acoustic grids to realistically simulate sound reflections on granite or forest ground surfaces.

For outer space scenes lacking real-world data, the team turned to rigorous scientific modeling. IT House cites a blog post stating that Apple carefully selected Amalthea, approximately 144 kilometers in diameter, as the focal point when developing the new “Jupiter” environment, ensuring that Jupiter appears both awe-inspiring and not overwhelming in the field of view.

Due to the absence of high-definition images, Apple enlisted NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a technical partner. Guided by JPL’s theories, the team accurately recreated Amalthea’s unusual terrain composed of rubble and ice, and added physical details such as Jupiter’s faint rings and light scattering beneath ice layers, which are often overlooked.

To achieve the most authentic scale and spatial sense, the team broke traditional development norms. Instead of building 3D models on conventional flat screens, designers directly used the Vision Pro headset to create the environment internally.

Dessero emphasized that he guided 3D artists throughout the process inside the headset for scene composition. This immersive creation method was crucial for spatial layout, requiring even the placement of individual rocks in close-up views to be repeatedly verified from the actual wearing perspective.

Additionally, this scene features real-time depth interaction. Users can now manipulate a timeline to witness how sunlight shifts across icy craters and how storms on Jupiter’s surface swirl, all in real-time.