Apple Vision Pro is set to arrive in the US on February 2, nearly eight months after the company first unveiled the device at WWDC 2023. When the device is launched next month, it could arrive with one less feature, as a keen-eyed X (formerly Twitter) user spotted changes to the company’s website and its introductory video — the latter is now a few seconds shorter than the original video — to hide one Vision Pro feature that was shown off at WWDC last year.
X user M1 (@M1Astra) spotted a change made to Apple’s introduction video on YouTube that was posted 7 months ago. The original video, which was 9 minutes and 11 seconds long, is now only 9 minutes long, which means that 11 seconds have been cut off from the video. The company has cut the Open Sky Environment feature that was touted to “magically replace” the wearer’s ceiling with a “clear, open sky.”
However, dragging the seek bar to 5:13 reveals the thumbnail preview from the previous video that showed a woman wearing the Vision Pro headset and facing the ceiling while viewing blue skies and clouds in its place, on the headset. The modified clip now jumps to the scene of a person pulling the Vision Pro over their eyes in a plane.
Similarly, Apple’s website has also been modified, and the text on the site that stated “[…] or magically replace your ceiling with a clear, open sky” has been replaced with ” […] or turn your room into a personal movie theatre with Cinema Environment.”
One possible reason why the feature might not be working as intended is due to hundreds of different kinds of roofs and ceilings that would make it difficult to optimise the immersive feature for all scenarios. Meanwhile, there’s no word from Apple on whether the feature has been completely cut from visionOS 1.0, or whether it will come to the headset as part of a future update.